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Former and current employees at an agency meant to keep elderly people and people with disabilities in their communities fear that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration are weakening the organization.
In March, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the Administration for Community Living “will be integrated into other HHS agencies,” including the Administration for Children and Families, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also known as CMS.
“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Kennedy said in a statement in March. This came the same day that Kennedy announced a dramatic reduction in the HHS workforce of 10,000 employees.
Kennedy later walked back the announcement and said that HHS would need to rehire as many as 20 percent of people fired as a result of the cuts.
But former employees fear this will hurt people with disabilities.
“It looks like it's being broken up for spare parts,” Daniel Davis, a career employee at ACL, told The Independent. Davis said that none of the career managers at the ACL spoke with the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s organization tasked with slashing government spending and that the political appointee working in the administration said she did not know any more than what had been said in the press release.
In 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration brought Administration on Aging, the Office on Disability and the Administration on Developmental Disabilities together under Administration for Community Living.
Last month, The Washington Post reported on a leaked budget document called a “passback” that states what the Trump administration would request to fund various organizations within the department. The passback document showed that the ACL was zeroed out, which is to say eliminated.
“You have to actually go to those pages to see what they are proposing to eliminate,” Alison Barkoff, who ran the ACL during the Biden administration, told The Independent. “We do not have any transparency at all, and there have been many, many oversight letters.”
Barkoff cautioned that cutting ACL comes at a time when more than 10,000 people turn 65 every day, according to the AARP, and one quarter of Americans have a disability.
“Cuts to ACL programs are just going to mean increases to other programs like Medicare, like Medicaid, and this is the one agency that helps people stay in their own homes and communities, instead of more expensive institutional care,” she said.
The passback document appears to show that HHS would want to eliminate programs such as the falls prevention program, which seeks to reduce the numbers of falls by elderly people, and the long-term care ombudsman program, which works to resolve problems related to residents of long-term care facilities.
In addition, the passback suggests eliminating money for protection and advocacy (P&A) programs for people with developmental disabilities and for state councils for people with developmental disabilities.
“Of the big disability programs that ACL administers, the only ones that would not be wiped out if the budget looks like it takes the recommendations from the passback would be Independent Living Programs,” one official within the organization who was granted anonymity to speak candidly told The Independent.
The staffer said that they were brought back in the rehiring. But ACL has slowed down significantly and in addition, the administration needs to justify every single payment and how it aligns with the Trump administration’s priorities.
The ACL is just one of many organizations that has been slashed significantly by DOGE and the Trump administration. In addition, the Trump administration has sought to eliminate or weaken the Department of Education, the US Administration for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The Independent has reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, on Monday, the department released a statement announced the release of $1.1 billion in funding new grant opportuntities for older people, people with disabilities and caregivers.
“We stand with our elders and individuals with disabilities — we don’t abandon them,” Kennedy said in the press release. “This funding directly invests in dignity, protects independence, and affirms every American’s right to age with respect and community. Restoring humanity to our health system is not optional — it’s the foundation of how we Make America Healthy Again.”
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