DHS Internal Budget Document Reveals Trump’s Proposed Health Cuts Could Decimate Rural Areas – by Jan Wondra
According to The Washington Post: “The HHS budget draft, known as a ‘passback,’ offers the first full look at
According to The Washington Post: “The HHS budget draft, known as a ‘passback,’ offers the first full look at the health and social service priorities of President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as it prepares to send his 2026 fiscal year budget request to Congress. It shows how the Trump administration plans to reshape the federal health agencies that oversee food and drug safety, manage the nation’s response to infectious-disease threats and drive biomedical research.”
While agencies within HHS can appeal for changes — they have to do so within the constraints of the new budget. (This is according to a federal health official who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity.)
Even before these drastic budget cuts, the Trump administration has cut HHS by at least one quarter of its workforce, estimated to be about 20,000 imminent departures since Trump was sworn in. The cuts have already hit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention programs, and National Institutes of Health staffers who manage scientific funding grants. But strangely, the proposed cuts focus on areas that Kennedy has said he actually wants to support … prevention-focused health-care efforts.
“These are the efforts that try to get ahead of health-care problems,” said Anand Parekh, chief medical adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, who spoke with The Washington Post. They quoted him as adding, “You can expect the costs of the Medicare and Medicaid program just to go up. That’s the shortsightedness of reducing the sliver of the budget that is discretionary when that is the main opportunity you have to reduce health burden in America and get ahead of health problems.”
As Ark Valley Voice reported yesterday, among the HHS programs being completely canceled nationwide, is the popular and for young children — lifechanging– Headstart program. There appears to be more to the budget cuts than what we have access to right now, which means Americans can stay-tuned — for more health and human services “shoes” to drop.
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