Trump HHS is eliminating an agency that ties poverty levels to benefits for 80 million people

Trump HHS is eliminating an agency that ties poverty levels to benefits for 80 million people

President Donald Trump's shots at the Department of Health and Human Services included the entire office that sets federal poverty guidelines. This will determine whether tens of millions of Americans will be eligible for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care and other services, the former staffer said.

The small team with technical data expertise worked out of HHS' Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, or ASPE. Their firing mirrored others across HHS that came without warning and left officials confused about why they were “rif’ed” — as in “reduction in force,” the bureaucratic language used to describe the burnings.

“I suspect that they adopted offices in them that had the word ‘data’ or ‘statistics’ in them,” said one of the fired employees, a social scientist who KFF Health News did not agree to because the person feared further accusation. “It was accidental as far as we can tell.”

Among the vents was Kendall Swenson, who had led the development of the poverty guidelines for many years and was led as a repository of knowledge on the subject, according to the social scientist and two academics who worked with the HHS team.

The firing could lead to a reduction in aid to low-income families next year unless the Trump administration restores the positions or moves their duties elsewhere, said Robin Ghertner, the fired director of data and technical analysis, which oversaw the guidelines.

The poverty guidelines are “needed by many people and programs,” said Timothy Smoeding, professor emeritus of economics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. “If you think about someone you fired and want reinstated, Swenson would be a no-brainer,” he added.

Under a 1981 bill, HHS is required annually to compile poverty line numbers for the Census Bureau, adjust them for inflation and create guidelines that agencies and states use to determine who qualifies for different types of aid.

There is a special sauce for creating the guidelines that includes adjustments and calculations, Ghertner said. Swenson and three other employees prepare the numbers independently and review them together before issuing them each January.

Everyone in Ghertner's office was told without warning last week that they had been placed on administrative leave until June 1, when their employment would officially end, he said.

“There is literally no one in government who knows how to calculate the guidelines,” he said. “And because we’re all locked out of our computers, we can’t teach anyone how to calculate them.”

Aspe had about 140 employees and, according to a former employee, was around 40 years old. The HHS shakeup merged the office with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ, whose staff has shrunk from 275 to about 80, according to a former AHRQ official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

HHS has said it has laid off about 10,000 employees and that its workforce has been reduced by about 20,000 in combination with other steps, including an early retirement program. However, the agency has not detailed where it made the cuts or identified specific employees it laid off.

"Workers were told they couldn't come to their offices, so there is no knowledge transfer," said Wendell Primus, who worked at Aspe during the Bill Clinton administration. “They didn’t have time to train anyone, transfer data, etc.”

HHS did not respond to a request for comment. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has so far declined to testify about staff reductions before congressional committees that oversee much of his agency. On April 9, a delegation of 10 Democratic members of Congress waited for a meeting in the agency's lobby.

The group was led by House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who told reporters afterward that Kennedy needs to appear before the committee "and tell us what his plan is to keep America healthy and stop these devastating cuts."

Matt Vanhyfte, a spokesman for the Republican Committee leadership, said HHS officials would meet with bipartisan committee staff on April 11 to discuss the burnings and other policy issues.

ASPE serves as a think tank for the HHS secretary, said Primus, who later served as Rep. Nancy Pelosi's senior health policy adviser for 18 years. In addition to poverty guidelines, the office establishes how much Medicaid money goes to each state and reviews any regulations developed by HHS agencies.

“These HHS staffing cuts – 20,000 – are obviously completely crazy,” Primus said. "These were not decisions made by Kennedy or staff at HHS. They are made in the White House. There is no rhyme or reason to what they are doing."

HHS leaders may be unaware of their legal obligation to issue the poverty guidelines, Ghertner said. If each state and federal government instead sets guidelines for itself, it could create inequities and lead to lawsuits, he said.

And meeting the 2025 standard next year could put benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk, Ghertner said. The current poverty level is $15,650 for a single person and $32,150 for a family of four.

“If you make $30,000 and have three kids, for example, and make $31,000 next year, but prices have gone up 7%, all of a sudden you're not buying $31,000 right away," he said, "but if the guidelines have stopped increasing, you may no longer be eligible for Medicaid."

The 2025 poverty for a family of five is $37,650.

As of October, about 79 million people were enrolled in Medicaid or its children's health insurance program, both of which are median-tested and therefore rely on poverty guidelines to determine eligibility.

Eligibility for premium subsidies for insurance plans sold in the Affordable Care Act marketplace is also tied to the official poverty level.

One in eight Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program or food stamps, and 40% of newborns and their mothers receive nutrition through the Women, Infants and Children Program, both of which also use the federal poverty level to determine eligibility.

Former employees in the office said they were not disloyal to the president. They knew their jobs required them to follow the administration's goals. “We tried to support the Maha agenda,” the social scientist said, referring to Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy” rubric. “Even if it didn’t align with our personal worldviews, we wanted to be useful.”

Dems need to get off Twitter and do their jobs to stop this lunatic. Don't hold signs, all wear pink as a "protest", whine for 25 hours like a speed freak or some other useless symbolic crap, but do the kind of checks that we wasted our childhoods learning in social studies and civics courses.

Trump & RFK are no kings, but no one is challenging these actions in any meaningful way. Firing federal worker shooters in all of these different areas where they have no justification is a blatant dismantling of the systems that make this a civilized country (or any country at all). They've already restricted peaceful protest/assembly by deporting legal immigrants for campus protests - what comes next won't be pretty.

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