In mid-January, anti-abortion activist Teresa Manning Wagner, the deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Population Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, was escorted from the building after supposedly resigning her post. Her acting replacement, Valerie Huber, has spent her career working against birth control programs and advocating for abstinence-only programs; she had no government experience before joining HHS last summer. HHS is more than two months late in publishing guidelines for the Title X grant program that provides free and low-cost birth control to 4 million low-income people annually. And to make matters worse, HHS is still without a permanent secretary after Tom Price resigned amid a scandal of his own.
What is going on at HHS?
We are one year into the administration of President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and little is known about the inner workings of HHS. It is one of the largest and most consequential non-defense agencies in federal government, with a 2018 budget of $1.1 trillion. When it comes to the health of millions of Americans, HHS wields great power to steer the ship and can often steer it quietly, without the help of Congress. The administration’s political appointees can be hugely influential in the policies that ultimately affect ordinary Americans. As they say, personnel is policy.
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