On Tuesday morning, scores of federal workers lined up outside the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. The impediment to entry: The swipe cards many of them used to access the building were no longer working, because they had been laid off.
If this is the chaotic and cruel way the new leaders of our nation’s health care infrastructure handle a reduction in force, we shudder to think how they’ll manage the next health care crisis — whether it’s on the scale of COVID-19 or a more localized E. coli outbreak caused by poor oversight at a meat-packing plant.
According to The New York Times and other outlets, additional federal workers — including officials in the upper echelons of leadership at subsidiary agencies such as the Food and Drug Administrations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — were in recent days offered reassignment to far-flung outposts of the Indian Health Service in what was clearly intended as an effort to compel their resignations. Others were simply placed on administrative leave ahead of their pending termination.
Peter Marks, formerly the top vaccine expert at the Food and Drug Administration, announced his departure last week and laid the blame squarely on newly installed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote in his letter of resignation, which was reportedly written after he was told he could quit or be fired.
As perhaps the most notable evidence that the agency is recruiting those whose blurry views of science align with Mr. Kennedy’s: A discredited vaccine skeptic named David Geier has been assigned the work of examining the potential connections between vaccines and autism — purported links that have been debunked by one study after another down through the decades. While Mr. Geier does not hold a medical degree, he was disciplined by Maryland’s Board of Physicians for practicing medicine without a license.
Susan J. Kressly, an actual doctor and the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, responded to news of Mr. Geier’s new role as a “senior data analyst” by warning that anything that misrepresents decades of sound research on this topic “poses a threat to the health of children and our nation.”
The rest of the world has reason to worry as well: The budgetary evisceration taking place in Mr. Kennedy’s sprawling fiefdom as well as in the bureaucracy overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others will lacerate foreign nations — many of them impoverished — where American health care aid and medical research have saved countless lives.
The damage being done here is going to be long-term, and it is the responsibility not only of Mr. Kennedy and his boss, President Donald J. Trump, but also of the Republicans in Congress who in February voted to confirm the new HHS secretary and are now standing around doing nothing.
They include U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, a physician who ended up supporting the nominee after receiving assurances that the secretary would support vaccine science. Sen. Cassidy responded to the news of Mr. Geier’s hiring by acting as if it might not be true (“Let’s get it confirmed first and then we can talk about it,” he said). Whether out of fear or stupidity, the senator allowed himself to be played.
The only thing worse would be inaction, but that appears to be his current strategy.
