In an interview with BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon shared how their respective agencies are working to eliminate bureaucracy.
On a Monday episode of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered,” Kennedy and McMahon detailed the excessive bloat they have discovered at HHS and the Education Department.
Kennedy told Gonzales, “We have a sprawling bureaucracy that has all kinds of redundancies and a lot of administrative costs.”
He explained that HHS under the Biden administration saw a 38% budget increase and a 17% increase in staff despite declining public health.
‘Who would have thought four years ago that we could actually have done an audit of the United States government through people who are volunteering to come in and do it?’
Kennedy noted that he plans to consolidate the agency’s more than 100 communications, 40 IT, and 40 human resources departments. He stated that with the extreme bloat, the agency had become “impossible” to govern, inspire, and unify its mission.
“These different agencies’ divisions were living in silos. And sometimes they devolved into kind of fiefdoms where they were at war with each other,” he continued. “I found out that medical information that is collected by one silo, they then sell it to the other groups in my agency, instead of sharing it and saying, ‘How do we use this in a way to improve patient care? How do we use it in a way to make people healthy?'”
“We’re cutting down 28 divisions into 15,” he added.
Kennedy told Gonzales that under the Trump administration, HHS would focus on cleaning up the nation’s food supply, including improving baby formula, ending the use of Generally Recognized as Safe standards, and removing dyes, chemicals, and seed oils contributing to the chronic disease epidemic.
He also stated that HHS is currently preparing new nutrition guidelines, which he estimated would include a three-page document advocating for whole foods.
McMahon revealed to Gonzales that she also noticed redundancies in the ED, noting that each department within the agency had its own human resources division.
She applauded Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency for conducting an outside audit “through very rapid use of technology” that exposed “a lot of the bloat.”
She pushed back on Democrats’ claims that eliminating the ED would hinder children’s education.
“The Department of Education going away simply means — and this is what the president really wanted to focus on — we’re just getting rid of the bureaucracy that is standing in between the kind of funding that is necessary to flow to the states while letting the states determine how they are going to educate their own children to have their own policies,” McMahon told Gonzales.
She added that the ED had reduced its overhead by roughly half, saving U.S. taxpayers $500 million annually, noting that the majority of the cuts were “mostly redundancies.”
“We’ll operate more efficiently,” McMahon declared. “Who would have thought four years ago that we could actually have done an audit of the United States government through people who are volunteering to come in and do it?”
She stated that Musk has sacrificed significantly to help trim the bureaucracy within the federal government and save taxpayers money.
“We owe him a debt of gratitude,” McMahon said.
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