The Trump administration has tasked two top political appointees with monitoring the Department of Government Efficiency's access to key systems inside the health agency responsible for managing Medicare and Medicaid, according to internal emails obtained by POLITICO. The appointees, Kim Brandt and John Brooks, are leading the CMS's "collaboration" with the unofficial cost-cutting group led by Elon Musk, including "ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems and technology."
The Trump administration is pushing the Department of Health and Human Services to go after "anything related to Covid" and contracts that would "be deemed wasteful by an average citizen if made public," according to an email sent to Food and Drug Administration staff on Thursday seen by Bloomberg. That includes General Services Administration contracts for services to support diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility offices, telework, swag or advertising spending, the memo said. Staff were asked to report data back on such wasteful spending by Thursday morning.
The White House is working on an executive order to fire thousands of HHS workers, according to people familiar with the matter. Under the order, the FDA, CDC, and other health agencies would have to cut a certain percentage of employees. The order could come as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter said, after workers have an opportunity to take a buyout. The terms of the order haven't been finalized, however, and the White House could still decide against going forward with the plans. The job cuts under consideration would affect HHS, which employs more than 80,000 people and includes the NIH and CMS, in addition to the FDA and CDC. The White House on Thursday denied that there is an executive order related to HHS coming.
A variant of H5N1 bird flu that has circulated widely in wild birds — and in several instances led to severe illness in humans — has turned up in dairy cattle for the first time. The findings were relayed in a short update from the USDA, which traced the new variant back to dairy herds in Nevada. The variant, known as D1.1 genotype, belongs to a different genetic lineage than what's fueled the infections in dairy cattle over the past year. Scientists believe a single spillover event, from birds to cattle, in the Texas Panhandle in late 2023 seeded the nationwide outbreak. But this new finding points to at least one additional instance of the virus hopping into dairy cattle.
Ridding Pennsylvania's health care system of private investors is part of Gov. Josh Shapiro's new budget plan, which calls for additional regulatory muscle to review hospital and nursing home sales, mergers and acquisitions. Shapiro this week asked the General Assembly for a bill that would empower the state attorney general to review health care transactions "with the community's best interest at the forefront." Two dozen other states already have such authority, but efforts to enact the necessary legislation in Pennsylvania have fallen short. House Bill 2344, which would have given the state attorney general the additional review powers Shapiro wants, passed the full House in July and was taken up in October by the Senate, where it died.