USA: At little-known health agency, DOGE ends dream ‘to make a difference’

Heather Sherman is one of the thousands of federal employees dismissed by a weekend email telling them they were “not fit for future employment.”

The trauma of that abrupt ending in mid-February — giving her just a few hours before all access was shut off — still lingers. “This was my dream job,” Sherman said.

If Sherman were an air traffic controller or nuclear materials expert, her work keeping the public safe would be obvious. But as a mid-level employee with a technical role at a little-known agency in the mammoth Department of Health and Human Services, her curt dismissal and that of an undisclosed number of AHRQ colleagues prompted not even a ripple of news coverage.

Yet what a New York Times editorial decried as a “haphazard demolition campaign” by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, one that is undermining “the safety and welfare of the American people,” applies to agencies like AHRQ and low-profile jobs like Sherman’s just as much as to more high-profile positions.

In complex systems, of which healthcare is surely one, carelessness has consequences.

A 2023 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology declared patient safety “an urgent national public health issue.” In truth, the urgency is embraced mostly by a small number of individuals determined to drastically reduce the estimated 160,000 Americans perishing each year from preventable medical errors in hospitals.

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Source: Forbes, 13 March 2025