Federal Health Policy

NPR reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promised Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) — a new umbrella agency he unveiled in March 2025 to replace much of HHS’s existing structure — still does not exist nearly a year later, even as major cuts have already hit departments like CDC, HRSA and SAMHSA. A June budget request sketches AHA as a home for programs in primary care, environmental health, HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, mental and behavioral health, and workforce development, but Congress provided no funding and key Hill committee staff say there has been no outreach from Kennedy’s team to authorize or bankroll it. Instead, seven current and former federal health officials tell NPR that planning is happening in rushed, secretive internal meetings, with senior staff ordered to provide budget and personnel data on short deadlines at the direction of an opaque circle of Kennedy loyalists. HHS refused to answer specific questions and offered only a boilerplate statement that planning is "still underway," leaving rank‑and‑file employees unclear which programs and jobs will survive and how the rapid April 1, 2025 cuts tie into any coherent reorganization. The piece underscores a widening gap between the administration’s rhetoric about "eliminating the alphabet soup" at HHS and the actual state of play: a hollowed‑out department, no appropriated money or clear blueprint for AHA, and growing anxiety inside the federal health bureaucracy over whether there is a workable plan at all.