The Trump administration plans to shut down a half dozen regional offices at the Department of Health and Human Services that work on everything from violations of nursing home safety standards to fraudulent hospital billing.
The regional offices are part of the Office of General Counsel, whose attorneys are basically the in-house lawyers for HHS. They advise the massive agency on how to write, publicize and enforce standards for a variety of federal health programs ― and what to do when a person, organization or business may be violating those standards.
The Trump administration’s plan is to reduce the number of regional offices from 10 to four, by eliminating the ones in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. That would leave four branches, one each in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City and Philadelphia.
HHS Acting General Counsel Sean Keveney announced the change during a 1 p.m. phone call Tuesday, according to several current and former HHS employees who spoke to HuffPost and requested anonymity.
During the call, Keveney said the department’s goal was to reduce staffing to 90% of its 2019 level, the sources told HuffPost, although they added he did not make clear whether closing the regional offices meant all staff in these offices would lose their jobs.
An announcement that HHS posted online Tuesday explained the move “as part of the department’s ongoing efforts to advance the Secretary Kennedy’s mission to Make America Healthy Again.”
This “consolidation,” the announcement said, “will provide the same geographic support for regional HHS offices at lower operating costs.”
Sources who spoke to HuffPost were skeptical, as was Sam Bagenstos, who served as HHS general counsel during the Biden administration.
“The lawyers in OGC’s regional offices are the ones who enforce rules protecting nursing home residents, children in Head Start, and other beneficiaries of HHS programs,” Bagenstos, who is a law professor at the University of Michigan, told HuffPost. “When hospitals go bankrupt, it’s the regional attorneys who protect patient safety and defend HHS’s financial interests.”
“Firing all these lawyers won’t promote efficiency,” Bagenstos added. “It will just cause needless harm.”
HHS has a $1.8 trillion budget, the largest of any cabinet agency. Most of that money flows through the two big federal insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, although significant portions go to a number of smaller programs ― including Head Start, the preschool program for low-income children, and the Indian Health Service.
On the internal phone call, the HHS sources said Keveney mentioned that the “high cost of real estate” was one reason the agency had chosen to close the offices. But other than that, Keveney did not say much about why the Trump administration had made the decision, or why it thought fewer lawyers chasing fraud would make the department more efficient.
“There was hardly any discussion at all, it was a 30-minute calendar [invitation], but it only lasted 11 minutes,” one person who heard the call told HuffPost.
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Neither Keveney nor the HHS media office responded immediately to inquiries HuffPost made by email on Tuesday evening.