President Trump’s Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr. Mehmet Oz, is being criticized for saying his number one priority right now is agency recruitment.
As seen below, at the Politico Health Care Summit on Monday, Oz looked at the audience and said, “The number one priority is the reason I’m here, is to recruit people. We are in need of high-quality individuals, talented folks.” He added, “And I’m not kidding around, if you have a family, friends, if you’re interested, this is a generational opportunity to serve.”
CMS Administrator @DrOz‘s No. 1 priority right now: Recruiting new employees.
“We are in need of high-quality individuals … and I’m not kidding around,” he told our @DashaBurns at @POLITICOLive‘s Health Care Summit. pic.twitter.com/ufkDGcxIcz
— POLITICO (@politico) April 21, 2026
Oz’s comments are receiving pointedly negative feedback on X, including, “I can’t imagine why they would have trouble finding employees willing to work for an anti-science, anti-government, anti-health care government who would very likely fire them in a year under the gimmick of budget cuts.”
Others mentioned how Oz’s warm embrace of new civil servants, those he imagines giving up private sector careers to work for the government, stands in opposition to the general disdain with which the Trump administration treats government employees.
Oz’s assertion that the government can help people, and that its workers are “important” — as Oz says of the CMS’s regional offices — contradicts the sentiments expressed by powerful administration figures like OMB Director Russ Vought, who said last year he wanted to traumatize bureaucrats. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” Vought said. “We want their funding to be shut down… We want to put them in trauma.”
Other Oz detractors took aim at his job fair-style recruitment, which saw him tell the crowd to tell their “family, friends” about the CMS opportunities, calling it a “generational opportunity to come serve.”
“This is a job fair,” wrote one commenter, “where there are no jobs and no pay and you will be sued and jailed for providing health care to a pregnant woman.”
Another commenter took Oz’s search for talent to point out that much of the talent that was already at CMS has headed for the exits, either quitting or being cut in a purge that has left the agency in need: “Dr. Oz at CMS saying recruitment’s priority one. Healthcare agency bleeding talent. Building agencies requires people. If hiring’s this hard, retention’s already a problem.”
[NOTE: In February 2025, former CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said she was concerned about the speed at which Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was cutting federal programs and firing employees. She said: “Indiscriminately firing people based on their status being temporary, without regard to what they do, is incredibly damaging.”]
The Wall Journal Journal also warned in February 2025 of DOGE representatives working at the agency’s offices who had gained “access to key payment and contracting systems.” DOGE leader Elon Musk posted a screenshot of one of the CMS reports on X, and wrote: “Yeah, this is where the big money fraud is happening.”
Yeah, this is where the big money fraud is happening https://t.co/jXqXrlKDGp
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2025
[NOTE: Other speakers at the Politico summit used the platform to raise concerns about the services provided by CMS, including Virginia Health Secretary Marvin Figueroa, who said: “Folks are going to lose coverage” under the new Medicaid work requirements in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Top drug lobbyist, PhRMA CEO Stephen Ubl, called Trump’s efforts to codify his signature drug pricing deals “the wrong policy prescription.”]