U.S. Rep. Keith Self also defends automobile tariffs and says “Signalgate” shouldn’t cost any jobs.
MCKINNEY, Texas — While Texas continues to address a growing measles outbreak, now at 400 cases, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a “dramatic restructuring,” cutting 20,000 employees, with half of them being fired.
HHS also canceled billions in federal grants that states used to track infectious diseases, such as measles.
Forty-one Texans have been hospitalized during the measles outbreak, many in Lubbock. And health officials in that Texas city lost three grants they were using to address the outbreak. The public health director said that grant money funded a full-time epidemiologist, a part-time nurse and extra temporary staff.
We asked Republican U.S. Representative Keith Self, R-McKinney, if he was concerned about public health in Texas after so many job cuts. He said no.
“The job cuts are not going to be on the front line,” the Congressman told us on Inside Texas Politics.
The Republican said the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest healthcare organization in the federal government and faces the same problems as HHS, including too much bureaucracy and regulation. Self said he met with the VA secretary just a couple of days before our conversation and that helped inform him on the HHS cuts.
“They have found that there’s layer upon layer of organization and supervision, so no, I’m not concerned at all because we’re finding so much bloat in the federal government,” said Self.
The Republican also defended President Donald Trump’s recently announced 25% automobile tariffs, arguing that the President is using tariffs as a negotiating tool to ultimately bring manufacturing back to the U.S.
But Congressman Self did acknowledge that folks who live in his district, CD-3, could face some financial hardships in the short term because of higher prices.
“The President’s been very clear that until he gets through the negotiation stage, and everything shakes out and the countries reach an equilibrium, there may be a short-term impact,” said the lawmaker. “And we’ll see how it shakes out, but I suspect that the tariffs will work.”
Congressman Self also told us he doesn’t think anybody should lose their job over “Signalgate,” when the Atlantic editor-in-chief was included in a group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging service.
During that chat, top Trump Administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance, discussed the details of a plan for airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen carried out earlier this month.
“It was a glitch in the system that this man was in there, in this chat,” Self said. “But no, this does not rise to taking a job.”
