Honestly, it’s hard to keep up with all the assaults on public health right now—and that’s by design. To those of us who work in public health or medical research (or higher education) it feels like it’s raining fire, and it’s hard to know what to focus on, how to spread reliable information to those who will be affected, and how to resist what’s happening when there’s Just. So. Much. Happening.
I had to focus my last update on the Trump regime’s disastrous cuts to NIH (that was enough on its own). So now it’s time for a roundup of some of the other disastrous Trump Attacks on Public Health that happened since my prior update on March 20. Buckle up, because it’s long and that’s the point:
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With one day’s notice, the Trump regime cut $11 billion from state health departments, effectively debilitating local and state public health infrastructure. Yes, that’s billion, with a b. Let’s be clear, this money was authorized by Congress as part of COVID relief bills, and was initially used for providing testing and vaccination related to COVID-19. The day after the cuts were announced, an HHS spokesperson backed the move up with a false assertion that “The COVID-19 pandemic is over” and asserting “HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.” Let’s be clear: the COVID-19 pandemic is still with us. In fact, 2,130 Americans died of COVID between Feb 16 and March 16, 2025. But even if you believe we should pretend it’s behind us, these cuts should very much concern you. Why? As of last year, the law allowed state and local governments to reallocate the funds from COVID-specific measures to other pressing public health concerns. We know that public health departments were using the money wisely to patch and enhance our crumbling local and state public health infrastructure. So, what are the things that public health can’t do anymore, as a result of these cuts?
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In Lubbock, TX, public health officials have received orders to stop work that was designed to help them fight measles there, in the epicenter of the current outbreak that has now spread outside Texas to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Mexico…maybe coming soon to a location near you!
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Funding to enforce infection-control measures in nursing homes, to help keep our grandparents (or parents) safe, is now at risk.
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In many states these funds were being used to upgrade immunization information systems; this means in many cases people won’t be able to log in to a centralized place to look up their immunization records after all, and will have to keep paper records on their own.
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Many wastewater testing programs will now be shuttered. This type of testing was found to be very effective during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and now are used more widely. In addition to COVID-19, health departments have now used the testing to track dangerous upticks in infections like influenza, mpox, and measles anonymously by seeing if virus appears in the wastewater of a community. Without the wastewater testing, they will have to resort to less reliable methods that rely on sick people going to a doctor and doctors reporting private details of each case to the health department. Since epidemiologists will have far less information about when viruses are spiking in their area, they can’t do as good a job warning residents of impending risks.
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On March 27, Trump’s chosen Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., announced massive cuts to the workforce at HHS, with about 1 in 4 full-time HHS employees losing their jobs (including 3500 people at the FDA, 2400 at the CDC, and 1200 at NIH). RFK Jr. also ordered the dismantling of large portions of the nation’s public health infrastructure:
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The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which oversees organ and bone marrow donation and has been the primary federal agency responsible for improving access to health care services for people who are poor, uninsured, living with HIV, etc.: Gone.
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The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which oversees services for, well, people who have substance use or mental health disorders: Eliminated.
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The Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, also gone, despite the fact that 20 million Americans have been diagnosed with Long COVID to date.
The orders call for HRSA and SAMHSA to be dismantled and some limited pieces absorbed into the new “Administration for a Healthy American” (AHA). The HIV prevention work that CDC used to oversee will also move there, along with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which protects workers from work-related injury and illness.
RFK Jr. and Trump may tell you that the most important work of these institutions will continue within the new AHA. But the disruption and decimation of the public health infrastructure is intentional and is absolutely not designed to improve the health of the average American.
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The Trump regime told Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, that he could resign or they would fire him. He resigned on Friday, writing in his resignation letter, “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary [RFK Jr.], but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” Dr. Marks served under multiple presidents, and he was one of the leaders of Trump’s own Operation Warp Speed, which helped save millions of lives in the US by getting COVID-19 vaccines safely distributed to Americans in a time period never before seen in human history (and which Trump bragged about, a lot). In 2020, Dr. Marks said if FDA greenlighted an unproven COVID vaccine he would resign in protest; he has now been forced out because he believes in the lifesaving power of well-regulated vaccines.
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Kevin Griffis, the CDC’s Director of Communications, also resigned last week, writing an op-ed in the Washington Post with the subtitle “Public health policy must be guided by facts and not fantasy.” He also wrote “In my final weeks at the CDC, I watched as career infectious-disease experts were tasked with spending precious hours searching medical literature in vain for data to support Kennedy’s preferred treatments.” Four other top CDC officials resigned along with Mr. Griffis. An administration that is driving away experienced leaders who have dedicated themselves to public health should not be taken lightly: our health and wellness is in danger.
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Remember when (way back on March 7), vaccine scientists around the world lost their minds after the CDC announced it was planning a large study about whether vaccines and autism might be connected, because this connection has already been debunked again and again and again? Well, on March 25 HHS announced that David Grier had been hired to lead the study. Grier is a well-known vaccine skeptic who has promoted false claims about the connection between vaccines and autism. He was also disciplined by Maryland regulators in 2011 for practicing medicine without a license. If this is the best that the US federal government could find to lead this study, the only possible conclusions to be drawn are (a) no one reputable would take this on because the science has already been settled, and/or (b) the Trump regime doesn’t want real science to be conducted, they just want someone who will “find” what RFK Jr. is looking for.
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On March 25, hours after the Senate confirmed Jay Bhattacharya to lead the NIH, the agency sent an email to contracting officers instructing them to respond by “noon today” with information on any contract that “may be related to any form of censorship at all or directing people to believe one idea over another related to health outcomes.” This sounds good—we’re all against censorship, right? But it goes on to list examples including contracts that promoted vaccine uptake, or public health messages about the “dangers of COVID or not wearing masks.” During his confirmation hearing, he stated “Science, to succeed, needs free speech, it needs an environment where there is tolerance for dissent.” In October, Dr. Bhattacharya posted on X: “If you favor government control of misinformation, you are an enemy of free speech.” Now, he wants to find and cancel funding for grants used to study media literacy, the effects of COVID lockdowns, or a whole list of other words. Perhaps he needs to look up what “censorship” means again?
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In his State of the Union address on March 4, Trump declared, “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.” Yet a new webpage on the Environmental Protection Agency’s website is now offering “Presidential Exemptions” to industries that put hazardous pollutants in our air. So much for getting toxins out of our environment—we’re not even going to hold toxin-producers to existing clean air standards that were keeping our environment as safe as it was. Perhaps they need to look up what “environmental protection” means again?
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Scientific jaws dropped around the country when RFK Jr. went on Fox News March 19 and said that instead of culling birds once H5N1 (bird flu) is identified in the flock, farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it.” As the former State Veterinarian for the State of Kansas said, “That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” since if H5N1 infects a flock of, let’s say, 5 million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate.” This would put all of us at risk of the virus spreading to humans and becoming more deadly to us. You might be saddened or outraged by the practice of culling birds who haven’t yet caught H5N1 from other birds in the flock, but the unfortunate reality is that H5N1 will cause “very painful deaths in nearly 100 percent of the chicken and turkeys” who are infected. Culling practices may not be pretty but at least they are quick, and they control the spread of this dangerous flu. For those who worry about the state of the economy, consider as well that letting H5N1 spread unchecked, as RFK Jr. suggests, would likely lead to trade embargoes against US poultry, with huge economic loss.
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On March 17, the White House removed from the HHS website the advisory from former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, which labeled gun violence as a public health issue. You may believe strongly in Americans’ right to bear arms, but you must also recognize the consequences of those rights. This includes that that since 2019, more children and adolescents in the US have died of firearm violence each year than of motor vehicle accidents, and that the firearm related death rate in the US in 2015 (10 years ago!) was 11.4 times higher in the US compared to 28 other high-income nations, and has only worsened since then. If we’re not willing to call gun violence a public health issue, then we’re living in denial. We might believe we need second amendment rights, but if we’re not willing to learn from what public health science can teach us about the epidemic of gun violence, then we are consigning our children to live (and die) with the epidemic.
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Let’s end by shining a light on an act of respect and resistance. On March 18, to comply with a new policy announced by VA Secretary Doug Collins, the Carl T. Hayden Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center removed a display of 22 tribal flags honoring the service of Native American veterans from the region around what is now called Phoenix, AZ. One week later, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs displayed the flags at the state capitol building in Phoenix, stating, “Arizona is proud of the Tribal Veterans who sacrificed for their country. We should be recognizing their service, not disrespecting their heritage.” If you feel like calling someone to say thank you for their fearless acts of resistance in this political era, please think about contacting her office. To be explicit: this is a public health issue, not just a political one. Even the George W. Bush Institute has gone on record recognizing the major challenges and health disparities American Indian and Alaska Native people face, even while this group serves in the military at higher rates than any other demographic in the United States. As the Bush Institute essay says, “We owe native American veterans a better health care system.” Erasing their existence from the very walls of the VA is a shameful act.
To my colleagues in public health: I see you and how hard things are right now. Let’s keep finding the little joys in our work and take the restorative moments we can, so we can keep fighting the good fight, saving lives, backed by science.