doge
Ready, Fire, Aim
Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service has cut thousands of people across federal health agencies, and more firings appear to be coming across departments, with plans due by March 13.
Government agency officials don't know how many employees have been laid off, according to STAT's Bob Herman. Lizzy recently reported that the Trump administration started quietly rehiring some FDA employees. This week, the Associated Press reported that the government rescinded the termination letters for about 180 CDC employees.
Meanwhile, there are news reports of DOGE terminating leases at FDA facilities across the country. However, that also is still fluid. Endpoints News reported that the Trump administration reversed a lease termination at a major FDA lab in St. Louis.
government funding
What's a continuing resolution and why does it matter to health care?
Last week, Republicans were preoccupied with a budget resolution, the first step toward budget reconciliation later this year. We've written a lot about the potential for cuts to Medicaid in the process and the recent difficulties that the GOP has encountered kicking off that process.
This week and next, Congress is preoccupied with the continuing resolution.
It's easy to confuse budget reconciliation with continuing resolution. When Congress can't agree on government appropriations legislation, lawmakers pass a continuing resolution to temporarily extend current funding levels to buy time to negotiate.
While the continuing resolution bill has received less attention, it still matters to the health care industry, though to a lesser degree than what will be at stake in the budget reconciliation.
In December, Congress passed a continuing resolution that extended Medicare telehealth authorities, subsidy programs for hospitals, and Medicare and Medicaid public health programs. Those will all expire by the end of March if Congress doesn't extend them again in another stopgap government funding bill. Government funding expires on March 14.
trump agenda
Health care barely mentioned in Trump's address
Other than introducing HHS Secretary RFK Jr., President Trump on Tuesday barely mentioned health care in his address to Congress, which took the form of a State of the Union address, though presidents don't deliver their first SOTU until after a year in office.
That doesn't mean Trump's agenda is without implications to health care. Congress' nonpartisan budget scorekeeper said Wednesday that Republicans must cut Medicaid or Medicare to even partially pay for the growing list of tax cuts that Trump outlined in his speech. Republicans say they only want to cut waste, fraud, and abuse from Medicaid, but there will no doubt be debate over whether the policies they pursue genuinely target wasteful spending.
Democrats tried to bring attention to the threat of Medicaid cuts during the speech. Rep. Al Green was kicked out of the House chamber where the speech took place for refusing to sit back down after shouting, "You have no mandate to cut Medicaid."
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