Two advocacy organizations for Alzheimer’s patients and research have sounded alarms about what they claim are harmful cuts by the federal government of national health workforces.

Us Against Alzheimer’s and the Alzheimer’s Association denounced the eliminations of 20,000 workers within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), saying the cutbacks inject instability, uncertainty, and delays into the system that provides disease prevention, cures, and safety monitoring.

 Alzheimer’s is the only top-10 cause of death that has no cure and impacts over 50 percent of U.S. families. Disorder in healthcare stemming from federal reductions could delay or prevent millions of people from receiving life-saving treatments, said George Vandenburg, head of Us Against Alzheimer’s.

The Alzheimer’s Association said programs such as the Healthy Brain Initiative and Building Our Largest Dementia (BOLD) Infrastructure, which had staff placed on administrative leave as part of the HHS reduction, affect Americans every day. BOLD was reauthorized by Congress last December.

HHS officials, while not addressing the Alzheimer’s concerns, said its “restructuring” will save $1.8 billion per year by reducing its full-time employees from 82,000 to 62,000. The agency also claimed its services will be streamlined by consolidating divisions and centralizing functions such as human resources and information technology.