1 day Ago By [email protected] (Lauren Clark)
Democratic politicians like Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes are responding to cuts being made at the federal level. On Tuesday, Mayes filed a lawsuit against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
over cuts being made at the department. FOX 10's Lauren Clark reports. PHOENIX - Department of Health and Human Services employees across the country are getting laid off , with the Trump administration saying this restructuring will save Americans $1.
8 billion a year, while insisting that critical services like Medicare and Medicaid will remain intact. "Over the past four years during the Biden administration, the budget increased by 38% and staffing increased by 17%, but all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans," said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The backstory: In a taped announcement, Kennedy Jr. laid out upcoming changes in his department. As part of Trump’s administration’s DOGE initiative, Kennedy Jr.
said the HHS Department will be streamlined to "make the agency more efficient and effective." "We are going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies, while preserving their core functions, by merging them into a new organization called the ‘Administration for Healthy America,’ or AHA," Kennedy Jr. said.
The other side: The move cuts 10,000 thousand jobs, and Democratic leaders across the country are calling it reckless. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is responding with a lawsuit on the matter, seeking a temporary restraining order from the court to invalidate the mass terminations. In her new lawsuit, AG Mayes claims Arizona stands to lose more than $239 million from cuts on programs like telehealth services, mobile vaccine clinics and more.
With the lawsuit, Mayes joined a coalition of 23 attorneys general with similar lawsuits. What AG Mayes Said: AG Mayes has released a statement on the funding cuts, which reads: "I cannot overstate how reckless and illegal these cuts are. These cuts target the very places that rely most on this critical funding.
Eliminating it would devastate our already precarious system and cost jobs across Arizona, from doctors to tribal health workers. I will fight this every step of the way." Mayes also argues the cuts will impact health services for those in rural communities the most.
Meanwhile, Arizona Public Health Association Executive Director Will Humble reacted to announcements from the Arizona Department of Health Services that the federal government was canceling several pandemic-era grants that totaled more than $190 million. Officials with HHS said the agency will no longer waste taxpayer dollars responding to a pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago. "Most of this work wasn’t designed and intended to specifically address COVID-19, which is five years old and the emergency is over," said Humble.
"It’s designed to fix the problems in the system that we identified during COVID-19." Humble, who has worked in public health for 40 years, argues this step is wasteful to Arizonans, as some money on these projects has been spent without the benefit of the end project. "You have $200 million worth of half-done projects sitting out there," said Humble.
"Who thinks that’s efficiency?" Information for this article was gathered by FOX 10's Lauren Clark..
