Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told lawmakers on Wednesday that HHS is “very aggressively” leveraging AI technologies to drive efficiencies and offset the operational impacts of proposed cuts in the department’s fiscal year (FY) 2026 budget.
Kennedy highlighted health IT as a priority under the proposed budget, which he said aims to “shift funding away from bureaucracy and toward direct impact.”
“We will strengthen cybersecurity and health IT,” Kennedy pledged to members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee on May 14 when discussing the budget’s priorities. “The AI revolution has arrived, and we are already using new technology to manage health data more efficiently and securely.”
The White House’s FY2026 budget blueprint for HHS requests $93.8 billion in discretionary funding – a 26.2 percent cut from current spending levels.
HHS has already started to make cuts across its workforce. Roughly 20,000 employees have been let go at HHS – 10,000 through a reduction in force and 10,000 who opted to take part in the deferred resignation program.
The department announced a “dramatic restructuring” at the end of March. In addition to cutting 10,000 employees, the restructuring also outlined plans to consolidate HHS’s 28 divisions into 15 new divisions.
According to HHS, the restructuring will “centralize core functions,” including those working in IT, human affairs, procurement, external affairs, and policy.
Kennedy promoted the benefits of that consolidation to lawmakers, noting there are 40 different procurement departments within HHS with “four separate computer systems that don’t talk to each other.”
“What we’re trying to do is go back to the pre-COVID levels, and to start making the department function as it would if, you know, in a rational universe, and to bring in modern AI and telemedicine,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy stressed that his job is to support President Donald Trump and the Office of Management and Budget on the proposed budget cuts. However, he said, “The reality is that no agency head wants to see cuts to his agency.”
“We are very, very aggressively implementing AI, and I think we’re going to do it faster and better than anybody else in government, any other agency,” he said. “We brought very, very high-quality caliber people from Silicon Valley … We can shorten clinical trials. We can. We can get rid of animal trials, which we’re already doing.”
“What we’re saying is, let’s organize [HHS] in a way that it can quickly adopt and deploy all these opportunities we have to really deliver high-quality health care to the American people,” Kennedy concluded.