Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sounded less enthusiastic about cutting his department’s budget during the first of several hearings Thursday than he did a year ago.
Then, Kennedy told lawmakers a proposed 25 percent cut to the Department of Health and Human Services was needed to rein in a bloated bureaucracy plagued with reckless spending, telling House appropriators a year ago: “We intend to do more, a lot more with less.”
Congress rejected the cuts and increased the HHS budget in a February spending bill. In front of the Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, Kennedy struck a different tone about President Donald Trump’s latest budget plan, saying administration officials had reluctantly proposed a 12 percent cut to cope with the federal debt.
He said that $2 billion in cuts to substance use and mental health grants his department issued and quickly reversed earlier this year, before the White House released its fiscal 2027 budget plan, had been a “mistake.”
And he said he’d sought again, as he did last year, to protect funding for the government’s nutrition and education program for low-income toddlers, Head Start. “It’s getting no cuts,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy did note several times that certain departments and functions at HHS are duplicative but said efforts to consolidate functions should not be seen as cost-cutting. “There was tremendous duplication of departments, we have 42 different maternal services in our department,” he said.
Addressing cuts proposed to a government nutrition assistance program for low-income people — the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children — which falls under the Agriculture Department, Kennedy told Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), he was “not happy about the cuts” and that he wasn’t the only administration official to feel that way.
The White House’s proposal calls for a $1.4 billion cut to the program.
“Nobody wants to make the cuts,” Kennedy said. “Russ Vought doesn’t want to make the cuts, President Trump doesn’t, but there’s a $39 trillion debt.”
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