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Services for over 300 programs. As a budget officer, I worked with the HHS
budget, efficiently compiling the individual agency budgets into the Office of
the Secretary Budget to the President. The operating budgets consisted of the
Public Health Service agencies, National Institutes of Health, Center for
Disease Control and Prevention, Indian Health Service, Health Resources and
Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services, Administration for Children and Families,
and Administration for Aging. HHS is one of the largest grant-making
agencies in the Federal government with some 60,000 grants per year, and I
helped keep it efficient.
I am Dr. Aron Primack and I served at the Department of Health and Human
Services in the National Institutes of Health. As an Oncologist, I was the
Program Director at the Fogarty International Center at NIH. My career
began following Northwestern University Medical School, Internship at
Boston City Hospital, Cornell Residency at the New York Hospital and
Medical Oncology fellowship at the National Cancer Institute. In the 1970s, I
lived in Uganda, doing cancer research as a senior investigator at the National
Cancer Institute. While I was working in my private medical oncology
practice, I was recruited to be the Administrator of the Medical Offices for the
United States Peace Corps. When I headed the U.S. Peace Corps in Niger, I
oversaw the medical offices in Niger, Mali, Chad, and Mauritania. This
position was followed by my appointment as Medical Director of Program
Integrity for the Health Care Financing Administration now Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS, managing Medicare). As a civil
servant overseas, our whole family had to live in the countries where I
worked, instead of in America. My attorney wife and I raised our children
there. I am proud to say our children have grown up centered in a life of
service. Our son who pursued Medicine, earned his MD and Ph.D., and is
now a tenured professor with an endowed chair in research, and our daughter,
an animal-rights activist and published poet, taught English at the Bard
College Prison System in New York, as well as developed a program in
English in a women’s prison system.
As the Program Director of the Fogarty International Center (FIC) at NIH, I
worked with low and middle income countries, often partnering with U.S.
Institutions, to develop their research capacity. Programs included Trauma in
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