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adam gaffney
Trump EPA's Gutting of Research Arm Called the 'Ultimate Friday Night Purge'
"You can't put a number on the lives that it has saved. Now Trump and Zeldin are killing it," said one physician.
Jul 19, 2025
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision Friday to eliminate its scientific research arm drew horrified responses from public health experts and climate advocates, who warned that the Trump administration is targeting the foundation of the department's work to shield Americans from hazardous chemicals, toxic pollution, and drinking water contaminants.
"This is grim news," said Adam Gaffney, an ICU doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance. "For decades, the EPA's Office of Research and Development has produced the science that underlies the regulations and technologies that protect us from innumerable hazards."
"You can't put a number on the lives that it has saved. Now Trump and Zeldin are killing it," Gaffney added, referring to the president's handpicked EPA administrator.
Since taking charge at the EPA, Lee Zeldin has moved aggressively to implement President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at gutting the agency's staff and freeing oil and gas corporations from regulatory restraints.
The agency will soon have 12,448 employees, after starting the year with more than 16,000. Staffers at the targeted research office—which had more than 800 employees as of earlier this week—reportedly learned of what one public health expert called "the ultimate Friday night purge" through the EPA's public press release.
In the statement, Zeldin said the elimination of the Office of Research and Development would help "ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment."
But scientists said the closure of the research office would have the opposite impact, leaving the agency's ability to protect the environment and public health badly compromised.
Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that "it is absolutely devastating that Trump officials would shut down this office in its entirety."
"Science, data, and research underpin all of EPA's work, from protections from harmful chemicals to air quality standards to safe drinking water. It's hard to see how EPA can fulfill its mission without its scientific research arm," said Goldman. "The nation enjoys a cleaner environment thanks to the decades of high-quality research coming out of this office. Our nation cannot let this stand. Members of Congress must act."
In his public messaging, Zeldin has deemphasized the EPA's fundamental responsibility to protect the environment, instead casting the agency as a promoter of "energy dominance"—the slogan Trump administration officials have used to describe the president's commitment to boosting fossil fuel drilling.
Earlier this year, Zeldin boasted about launching "the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history," targeting power plant rules, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, and other regulations.
"Out in the open, Zeldin's EPA has been dismantling protections against precisely the sorts of dangers that right-wingers warn are coming from alleged deep-state conspiracies: toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that corporations have lobbied to freely inject into our air, water, food, and bodies," The New Republic's Kate Aronoff wrote in a recent column.
"Among the broader suite of regulations Zeldin's EPA has promised to roll back," Aronoff wrote, "is one that would require coal-fired power plant operators to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities, limiting their ability to freely discharge toxins like mercury, arsenic, selenium, lead, and bromide and to threaten local drinking water supplies."
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GOP Activist-Turned-Federal Prosecutor Sends 'Threatening' Letters to Medical Journals
One doctor and public health advocate called on editors to "join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail."
Apr 25, 2025
Reports of letters that an interim U.S. attorney has sent to several medical journals in the United States prompted a show of solidarity from the U.K.-based Lancet on Friday, with the publication denouncing "the harassment of journals" and warning it "comes amid wider radical dismantling of the USA's scientific infrastructure."
The letters, containing questions about the academic journals' bias, come a year after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he hoped to prosecute medical journals and accused the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)—which condemned President Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020—of "lying to the public."
The letters from interim U.S. Attorney Edward Martin, who has previously been accused of using his office to target Trump's critics, are "an obvious ruse to strike fear into journals and impinge on their right to independent editorial oversight," said The Lancet.
NEJM is one of at least four medical journals that have received the correspondence from Martin recently. According to Medical Professionals Reference, the peer-reviewed journal CHEST, which is published by the American College of Chest Physicians, received a letter on April 14 with the following questions and a demand that editors respond by May 2:
- How do you assess your responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation?
- How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?
- Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints?
- How do you assess the role played by government officials and funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health in the development of submitted articles?
- How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled their readers?
Martin also asked the editors whether "publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints."
Psychiatrist Eric Reinhart of Northwestern University posted the letter on X last week and asked what kinds of "competing viewpoints" Martin—former chair of the Missouri Republican Party and president of the right-wing Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund—might want to see a medical journals about respiratory health.
"'Is sarcoidosis actually bad?" Reinhart suggested sardonically. "Should trans people get treatment for chest infections? Is ivermectin the cure for lung cancer? Why shouldn't Joe Rogan perform lung transplants? So glad RFK Jr. is in charge to ensure these important views get airtime."
Reinhart urged other scientific journal editors to speak out against threats they receive from the Trump appointee.
Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts and former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, also called on journal editors to "join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail."
"It is yet another example of the Trump administration's effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse—an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect," Gaffney told MedPage Today last week.
The letters have been received by the medical journals as Kennedy angered medical experts and families with his recent comments about autism, claiming that "most cases now are severe"—a claim not backed up by science. Kennedy has also recently downplayed measles outbreaks in the United States before finally admitting this month that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is the best defense against the disease.
The Trump administration has also cut funding for health agencies, prompting concern that it is sabotaging the country's ability to produce high-quality biomedical research as it has for generations.
NEJM responded to Martin ahead of the May 2 deadline, telling the prosecutor the journal uses "rigorous peer review and editorial processes to ensure the objectivity and reliability of the research we publish. We support the editorial independence of medical journals and their First Amendment rights to free expression."
Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the publication, told The New York Times, "Our job is to evaluate science and evaluate it in an unbiased fashion."
"The questions seem to suggest that there's some bias in what we do—that's where the vaguely threatening part comes in," Rubin said.
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A $600 Billion Swindle: Study Makes Case to 'Abolish' Medicare Advantage
"The time has come to declare MA a failed experiment," write the authors of a new paper.
Jun 10, 2024
A new academic analysis published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine details the enormous sums that privatized Medicare Advantage plans have cost U.S. taxpayers in recent years and calls for the abolition of the program, which has been massively profitable for the insurance giants that dominate it.
Citing the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the paper notes that Medicare Advantage (MA) plans have overcharged the federal government to the tune of $612 billion since 2007—and $82 billion last year alone.
MA plans—now used by more than half of the eligible Medicare population—utilize a range of tactics to reap larger payments from the federal government, which provides insurers a lump sum for each Medicare Advantage patient. The size of the payment depends on the enrollee's health, which MA plans are notorious for portraying as worse than it is in order to receive heftier government payments.
"Paradoxically, despite those overpayments, MA plans spend 9% less on medical services than [fee-for-service] Medicare spends for comparable enrollees," reads the new study. "If MA plans pay for less care, where do the overpayments go? Some pay for supplementary benefits, although plans do not disclose how much they spend on them, and MA enrollees do not get significantly more dental care or incur lower out-of-pocket dental costs than those in FFS Medicare. Instead, overhead and profit eats up the lion's share."
The study's authors estimate that MA plans' overhead from 2007 to 2024 was $592 billion, which is "equivalent to 97% of taxpayers' $612 billion overpayments to them during that period."
"Medicare Advantage plans have, in effect, stolen hundreds of billions from taxpayers."
Dr. Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the new study, said in a statement that "Medicare Advantage is a bad deal for taxpayers."
"Money that could be used to eliminate all copayments or shore up Medicare's Trust Fund is instead lining insurers' pockets," said Gaffney. "And the private insurers keep Medicare Advantage enrollees from getting needed care by erecting bureaucratic hurdles like prior authorizations and payment denials."
Gaffney and study co-authors Drs. Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein—co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program (PHNP)—argue based on their examination of Medicare Advantage's decadeslong history that "the time has come to declare MA a failed experiment and abolish it."
"Medicare Advantage plans have, in effect, stolen hundreds of billions from taxpayers," says David Himmelstein, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and a research associate at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "And the private plans' schemes also raise seniors' Part B Medicare premiums. Even seniors who don't choose to enroll in Medicare Advantage are subsidizing the private plans' profits."
The study's authors observe that the elimination of Medicare Advantage would allow the federal government to use the roughly $88 billion in estimated MA overpayments for the coming year to instead "upgrade benefits for all Medicare beneficiaries." Traditional Medicare typically does not cover dental, vision, or hearing services, which often leads people to choose MA plans.
"A smarter, thriftier way to expand benefits and lower out-of-pocket costs is possible for all Medicare beneficiaries, but first, we must eliminate MA and double down on traditional Medicare, covering all enrollees in an expanded and improved Medicare program," the analysis concludes. "That would be a good deal for patients and taxpayers."
Wendell Potter, a former insurance executive who has become a trenchant critic of Medicare Advantage, told Common Dreams that he agrees with the study's authors that MA "should be eliminated."
"Not only has it never saved taxpayers a dime since it was created during the George W. Bush administration, but it has cost us $592 billion over the last 17 years because of the high administrative costs inherent in the program and the way insurers have rigged the system to get paid excessively every year," said Potter, president of the Center for Health and Democracy.
"The program is so entrenched, and the companies have so much political influence over Democrats as well as Republicans through campaign contributions and lobbying, that eliminating the program will be a heavy lift, at least in the near term," Potter added. "That means that proposals to reform MA that address overpayments and abuses like prior authorization are essential and important for reform advocates to support."
This story has been updated to include comment from Wendell Potter.
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