Health and Human Services

It has not always been easy to identify DOGE’s activities within Health and Human Services. Early coverage following DOGE’s activities at the children of HHS - themselves massive agencies like CDC, CMS and FDA - often missed the forest for the trees. Thankfully, government-supplied declarations in court cases like AFL-CIO vs. DOL have provided details and context. HHS has been a target of every single one of DOGE’s various initiatives. Early cost-cutting efforts eliminated staff at the CDC and the FDA, which also was targeted for deregulation. As the parent of Medicare and Medicaid, CMS was a natural target to be scrutinized for excessive costs, but DOGE has yet to make any wildly unsubstantiated claims there. More recently, DOGE has been using some of the HHS databases to mine for data on immigrants, and their access to the medical claims of millions of Americans should be troubling to all. Health and Human Services is the parent agency for several other important agencies where DOGE has also had a presence:

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) do just that for disease response and management. They are headquartered in Atlanta.
• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administers government-provided healthcare plans for millions of Americans.
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is primarily responsible for ensuring the safety of many foods (except meat), medications and medical devices.
• National Institutes of Health (NIH) are a collection of centers that fund and track research in various medical fields

Since DOGE staff have been granted wide access to systems across all these agencies, I have collected them all on this page, but I will still try to track internal transfers.