RFK Jr.: We Fired Some People by Mistake

Some of the thousands of federal health workers abruptly fired this week will be reinstated, says their boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The secretary of Health and Human Services told reporters that the chaotic back-and-forth is a necessary part of the process being undertaken by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, reports the Hill.

• "Part of the DOGE—we talked about this from the beginning—is we're going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we'll make mistakes," said Kennedy.

Kennedy previously said he wanted to cut 10,000 employees as part of a restructuring of HHS, and whole divisions of the CDC, the FDA, and the National Institutes of Health were eliminated, per the Wall Street Journal. "Some programs that were cut, they're being reinstated," Kennedy said Thursday. "Personnel that should not have been cut were cut. We're reinstating them." One of the programs being reinstated is one at the CDC that monitors lead levels in children's blood. (More Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stories.)