DOGE has cut the Department of Health and Human Services so aggressively that even the department’s secretary has had trouble keeping up.
“I’m not familiar with those cuts,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week in a CBS interview when pressed about the billions of dollars promised to state health agencies that were rescinded by his agency and touted by DOGE as “savings.” Kennedy also demurred on a question about how, exactly, DOGE decides which programs are worthy of being cut.
“They have a very, very sophisticated group of people, and they have very sophisticated systems for detecting fraud, waste and abuse,” Kennedy said.