Health and Human Services Department Sought to Spend an Estimated $159 MILLION Per Year on New Employees to Help Run Obamacare

Photo Credit: Reuters Documents obtained from the Health and Human Services Department through a Freedom of Information Act request show that on the day the Affordable Care Act became law, the agency received fast-track authority to hire 1,814 new high-level employees to put Obamacare into practice, at a likely cost of more than $159 million per year.

It’s unclear whether those employees were ever hired. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

But the hiring request was approved by the Obama administration’s Office of Personnel Management despite a government-wide hiring freeze.

Judicial Watch, a nonprofit that has told MailOnline it files ‘hundreds’ of such FOIA requests, showed MailOnline the documents on Thursday. They show that HHS designated the hiring as a project worthy of ‘direct-hire appointing authority,’ a mechanism designed to sidestep normal restrictions on how much federal agencies can spend on personnel.

An analysis by MailOnline indicates that the annual base pay for those 1,814 employees, many of them slated for hiring at the highest salary levels available, would exceed $127.7 million.

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