Twenty general prosecutors, including the AGS in New York, California, Colorado and Michigan, continued the Trump administration on Monday about its mass dismissals and the dismantling of agencies within the Ministry of Health and Social Services.
The trial, led by the Prosecutor General of New York, Letitia James, alleges that the administration violated hundreds of laws and bypassing the authority of the Congress by trying to consolidate the number of HHS agencies from 28 to 15 years old and to launch layoffs of around 20,000 employees.
James called “dangerous, cruel and illegal” dismissals at a press conference on Monday.
“This administration does not rationalize the federal government; they sabotage it,” she said in a statement. “When you dismiss scientists who are looking for infectious diseases, silence the doctors who take care of pregnant people and close the programs that help firefighters and minors breathe or prosper, you do not make America healthy – you put countless lives in danger.”
HHS announced restructuring at the end of March as part of the broader effort of the Ministry of Efficiency to reduce the size of the federal workforce. The cuts included 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 hundreds of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 1,200 employees at the National Institutes of Health.
HHS said it would create a new agency, the administration of a healthy America, to absorb certain responsibilities provided by licensed agencies, such as mental, environmental or workers’ health programs.
But the trial says that recent cuts will have “severe, complicated, written and potentially irreversible” consequences. The Attorneurs General said in a press release that the restructuring had made HHS unable to fulfill many of its vital functions by avoiding mental health and substance consumption services, paralyzing the country’s HIV / AIDS response and reducing support for low -income families and disabled people.
In particular, according to the press release, the Trump administration dismissed the personnel responsible for maintaining federal poverty lines – that states use to determine the elimination for food assistance, housing support and Medicaid – and have reduced the team behind the low -income energy aid program, which helps families heat and cool the bills.
Half of the workforce of toxicing Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – one of the dismantled HHS agencies – was also terminated, according to the press release. Consequently, the attorneys general said that the national investigation into drug use and health has been interrupted and the federal team leading 988 suicide and crisis Lifeline disappeared.
The CDC has lost several laboratories to monitor infectious diseases, an office focused on the control and prevention of tobacco and a team that has monitored maternal mortality in the United States, the statement.
“The federal government has so much reduced the laboratory capacity that they have almost stopped testing measles in the middle of an unprecedented measles epidemic,” James said at the press conference. “The New York Public Health Laboratory, Wadsworth Center, one of the only laboratories in the country still equipped to detect rare infectious diseases, rushes to fill the vacuum left by a hollowed -out CDC.”
The HHS has also emptied the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a CDC agency which helped detect health problems among workers with toxic exhibitions.
The Trump administration has said that some programs such as the World Trade Center Health Program, which covers screening and treatments for diseases linked to 9/11, or the coal workers’ health monitoring program, which exceeds black lungs among minors, will continue by the administration for healthy America. But many NIOSH employees involved in the programs have been put on administrative leave and face imminent layoffs in June, according to a internal government report obtained by NBC News.
Monday’s trial calls on HHS to stop their efforts to dismantle agencies and restore critical programs that have been lost. James said his office would ask for a preliminary injunction this week to temporarily prevent the Trump administration from doing other cuts.
The trial is not the first to challenge the mission of reducing the federal government. A coalition of 23 general prosecutors continued the HHS in April for the end of $ 11 billion in public health subsidies, some who helped state health services to respond to disease epidemics. A federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts but has not yet rendered the final decision.
