(WASHINGTON) — On the heels of terminating 10,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services this week, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told ABC News some programs would soon be reinstated because they were mistakenly cut.
Kennedy’s comments were in response to a question about a branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that monitors lead levels among children and manages prevention across the country. The program was gutted on Tuesday.
“There were some programs that were cuts that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said other programs across HHS would be reinstated as well.
Of the cuts that were made, he said some would be brought back because they were not the administrative roles that the Department of Government Efficiency, run by billionaire Elon Musk, was aiming to eliminate, such as communications or human resources jobs, and that research or “studies” were also wrongly swept up in the mass layoffs.
“We’re streamlining the agencies. We’re going to make it work for public health, make it work for the American people,” Kennedy said. “In the course of that, there were a number of instances where studies that should have not have been cut were cut, and we’ve reinstated them. Personnel that should not have been cut were cut — we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan.”
That was news to Erik Svendsen, the director of the division that oversaw the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention branch, who told ABC News in an interview that the work was completely stopped. Svendsen had not received any indication it would be reinstated or continued through another part of the CDC.
Kennedy did not respond to a question about when jobs would be reinstated. ABC News has reached out to HHS for more details on which roles, if any, have been asked to return.
It would not be the first time that jobs were reinstated after DOGE cuts. In the first round of firings, targeted at probationary workers, hundreds of CDC and Food and Drug Administration employees were later brought back.
“And one of the things that President Trump has said is that if we make mistakes, we’re going to admit it and we’re going to remedy it, and that’s one of the mistakes,” Kennedy said.
But even as he acknowledged that his department cut people mistakenly, Kennedy has maintained, including in comments earlier Thursday, that no front-line work or essential services were affected by the massive restructuring he’s overseeing.
“The cuts in all of our agency are not affecting science,” he said. “Front-line enforcement jobs and health delivery jobs are preserved.”
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
