WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to reshape the federal health department has left its roughly 1,000 emergency response workers in limbo, and with a daunting order: Sort out how you break up — this weekend.
The George W. Bush-founded Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response is caught in the crosshairs of Kennedy’s mass restructuring. Established to respond to national disasters from Hurricane Katrina to infectious disease outbreaks, ASPR has worked for two decades as an independent division within HHS, collaborating across the health, defense, and homeland security departments. It includes the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which finances the development of new biomedical technology and played a crucial role during the Covid-19 pandemic.
BARDA will now be combined with a President Biden-founded agency under a new “Office of Healthy Futures,” according to two people familiar with discussions happening Friday. The decision cleaves the biomedical group from its emergency response agency, which will be shuffled into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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