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April 3, 2025<\/strong> \u2013 A day after the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began firing employees and eliminating entire departments as part of a massive reduction and reorganization<\/a> of its workforce, Calley Means defended the cuts in a combative interview at a Politico Live healthcare event in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n Means, the co-founder of healthcare startup TrueMed, is working with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a special government employee at HHS and is a central figure in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, and he described the cuts as a dismissal of bureaucrats.<\/p>\n Politico\u2019s Dasha Burns pushed back<\/a> on that framing, citing the fact that career employees, including scientists, have been let go. \u201cThose scientists have overseen a record of utter failure,\u201d Means said. \u201cFundamentally what Bobby has done is, he has taken over a department that has utterly failed.\u201d<\/p>\n While sparring with hecklers in the audience, whom he accused of being lobbyists, Means accused Burns and the media at large of ignoring a chronic disease epidemic<\/a> among American children and said Kennedy\u2019s focus is on solving that issue, starting with<\/a> understanding \u201cwhat\u2019s in our food.\u201d But he didn\u2019t provide answers as to how Kennedy plans to get that work done with a drastically reduced workforce, including at least 3,500 dismissed Food and Drug Administration (FDA)<\/a> employees.<\/p>\n Means said cutting \u201cindirect costs\u201d would allow HHS to send more money to researchers, although some research funding on chronic disease has already been cut<\/a>. That same day, a coalition of researchers<\/a> filed a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is part of HHS, challenging cancellations of research grants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n