Baddy Kennedy is slashing health agencies, because of course he is.

Robert F Kennedy Jr said the nation’s health agencies will cut 10,000 jobs from their 82,000-person workforce – an enormous reduction the US health secretary characterized as streamlining federal bureaucracy amid internal resistance to the administration’s agenda.

The cuts announced on Thursday, along with previous restructuring and voluntary buy-outs, mean the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will lose roughly 20,000 workers.

Kennedy said the department will also close half of its regional offices and create a new agency called the “administration for a healthy America”, or AHA.

Aha, Kennedy wants us all to rely on quack medicine instead of the real kind.

HHS is among the largest branches of the federal government, overseeing a $1.7tn budget and agencies that are household names. Among the agencies under HHS’s oversight are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Not exactly frivolous, one might think. Not superfluous. Not items you want to take an axe to without compelling reasons.

“Any cut you make to a health agency should be done with incredible care and consideration for the hundreds of millions of Americans who rely on their work to stay healthy and get treatment when they’re sick,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, previously the Biden administration’s CMS administrator and now a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Taking a “wrecking ball” to health agencies and “laying off thousands of people … doesn’t move us forward”, Brooks-LaSure said.

But surely Kennedy knows for a fact that all those laid off people were not doing anything of value. Doesn’t he?