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department of health and human services
Won’t DOGE Think of the Children?
Children are bearing the brunt of upheaval in Washington; the destruction of Head Start will harm even more.
Apr 10, 2025
Children have rarely been a national priority in the United States. Lawmakers have historically chosen to set aside the needs of children, families, and educators, with Head Start being one of the few examples of meaningful investment in children’s futures. But amid recent cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services, including layoffs at the Administration for Children and Families (which funds Head Start), the future of this program is uncertain.
Effectively destroying an essential program like Head Start and dismantling the Department of Education (DOE) and other federal agencies is cruel, irresponsible, and short-sighted. Childcare costs more than ever, and Head Start and Early Head Start, which provide access to high-quality early learning programs for children from low-income backgrounds, are lifelines. Without Head Start, hundreds of thousands of children will go without safe places to learn and grow. Parents, especially women, depend on it and other forms of childcare to stay in the workforce. Unless care is available, many are forced to cut hours or leave their jobs altogether, hurting household incomes and overall economic growth.
“It’s going to affect a lot of families that are already struggling,” Early Head Start educator Sandra Dill, who runs a family childcare program in Connecticut, said recently.
State-based solutions will help chip away at the vast problems facing the early childhood education sector, but wiping away Head Start and Early Head Start will set us back for years—possibly generations—to come.
At the same time, childcare providers, including family childcare educators who run small businesses in licensed, home-based settings, are facing exorbitant and rising prices for basic supplies that they need to keep their programs running. Without much-needed funding from the federal government, many of these programs—already existing on razor-thin margins—will be at risk of shutting their doors and leaving families without care options, worsening an already dire childcare shortage.
Amid the layoffs of thousands of government employees including Head Start administrators, there will certainly be chaos and confusion in the coming weeks among programs and the families who rely on them, with a lack of understanding of how already approved funds will be distributed. This will likely be similar to what ensued amid the federal funding freeze in January, with some programs temporarily closing their doors, unable to access funding for weeks, and families going without care.
Since the pandemic, the home-based childcare educators in All Our Kin’s networks have seen a significant surge in toddlers struggling with language and learning delays. Heath and Human Services and the DOE provide critically important early intervention services, including for children aged 0 to 3. Without these programs, fewer children will have a strong start in life. More will go without healthy meals, and fewer will have opportunities for social-emotional development or be prepared to succeed in kindergarten and beyond, and will have fewer opportunities for social and emotional development. Actions to shrink these departments in the name of cost cutting could overburden states and ultimately lead to far greater societal and economic consequences.
We are encouraged by bipartisan progress at the state level. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has proposed increased investments to help pay childcare providers competitive wages. In New York, there is a proposal from Gov. Kathy Hochul for additional funds to be set aside for family childcare providers to make renovations and repairs to their programs. And universal childcare has gained momentum in states like New York, Michigan, Oregon, Vermont, and New Mexico.
State-based solutions will help chip away at the vast problems facing the early childhood education sector, but wiping away Head Start and Early Head Start will set us back for years—possibly generations—to come.
Every child deserves a high-quality, affordable education, especially in the critical formative years of their lives. If we want a strong economy, we must save Head Start and protect the futures of the children and programs it supports.
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The Long Roots of Trump’s Assault on Public Health
For half a century, extremist libertarian, corporate, and Republican ideologues have sought demolition of public safety net programs, regulations, and reforms, and elimination of personnel to carry them out.
Apr 04, 2025
Of all the slash and burn terminations U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk are inflicting on public agencies, few will have a more far-reaching, devastating impact than the frontal assault on Americans' health, safety, and living standards.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, warned that the shock and awe cuts of Health and Human Services (HHS) staff—a 25% decimation—and programs, "will increase the morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs, and undermine our economy." It also advances a decades-long dream of the far-right.
For half a century, extremist libertarian, corporate, and Republican ideologues have sought demolition of public safety net programs, regulations, and reforms, and elimination of personnel to carry them out. But it has required the authoritarian collaboration of Project 2025, Trump, Musk, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to begin to implement this program.
"It is clear to union nurses that the goal of this administration and congressional Republicans is not to improve health, but to slash services and ultimately privatize the goods and services that are meant to serve all of us, so that their billionaire donors can boost their profits."
Public protests and legal challenges were already underway as the first round of layoffs and forced retirements undermined healthcare. The widespread scope of the latest mass firings, especially at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reinforces the urgency of a response.
It included the agencies responsible for medical research, tracking disease, drug approvals, and regulating food safety, said TheAssociated Press. The Bullwark's Sam Stein termed it "an absolute bloodbath" with a "generation of scientists, healthcare officials being wiped out," Common Dreams noted.
Union officials said CDC layoffs eliminated programs focused on smoking, lead poisoning, gun violence, asthma and air quality, and occupational safety and health, AP added.
Entire departments studying chronic diseases and environmental protections were gutted, The New York Times reported. Officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told their offices were being eliminated. HIV prevention was a target. Funding cuts for the healthy aging program apparently eradicated the government's Alzheimer's program, noted Rachel Maddow. Layoffs also hit people working on bird flu and measles.
The cruel spirit of the actions was evidenced by ultimatums given to multiple health experts to relocate to remote areas of the continent from Indian Health Services territories to Alaska. Or leave their jobs, in malicious messaging characteristic of Trump's reign, as voiced by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik that only "fraudsters" would complain about Social Security recipients losing their earned monthly checks. Among them were directors at the National Institutes of Health and the directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Nursing Research.
"The FDA as we've known it is finished, since most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed," former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf wrote on LinkedIn. Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, said the HHS cuts, paired with an $11 billion cut in funding to state and local health departments announced this week, "will increase the morbidity and mortality of our population, increase health costs, and undermine our economy."
"It is clear to union nurses that the goal of this administration and congressional Republicans is not to improve health, but to slash services and ultimately privatize the goods and services that are meant to serve all of us, so that their billionaire donors can boost their profits," said National Nurses United.
"From a policy perspective, the changes initiated at HHS by the second-term Trump administration are far-reaching. Since coming to office, the Trump administration has aggressively sought to reshape the U.S. public health agenda," wrote Simon Haeder, Texas A&M University public health professor.
In addition to the mass firings, the Trump administration is pursuing plans to weaken the Affordable Care Act and challenge state programs focused on health disparities. And the House is moving forward with its plans to devastate Medicaid with up to $880 billion in cuts to help pay for its $4.5 trillion tax gift for billionaires.
The scheme is particularly manifest in plans to roll back numerous regulations on "everything from clean water to safe vaccines," Haeder emphasizes. "Regulation has emerged as the most prolific source of policymaking over the last five decades, particularly for health policy...Vast cuts to the HHS workforce will likely curtail this capability, resulting in fewer regulatory protections for Americans... With fewer experienced administrators on staff, industry influence over regulatory decisions will likely only grow stronger."
Putting 'Democracy in Chains'
Corporate titans and the libertarian far-right have long pushed deregulation and privatization. In her seminal work Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean profiles right-wing economist James M. Buchanan who for half a century promoted a definition of "liberty" that insulates private property rights from government. Through his "public choice theory," for which he won a Nobel Economics Prize, he condemned majority rule as self-centered voting rights that results in "overinvestment in the public sector" and subjects the minority, meaning corporations and the elite, to "discriminatory" taxation and legislation.
Buchanan established a libertarian think tank at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, enthusiastically funded by oil magnate Charles Koch. Its goals included destroying Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Buchanan showed his disdain for anyone harmed by writing that people who failed to save money for the loss of public protections "are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to… animals who are dependent." Tyler Cowen, Buchanan's successor at Mercatus, MacLean notes, projected "rewriting of the social contract" that included slashing Medicaid. Compensation for a "fiscal shortfall" from the handouts to the elite, "will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers."
Buchanan would see his views come to fruition in Chile, MacLean notes, after Gen. Augusto Pinochet's murderous coup in 1973. It was followed by a rewriting of the country's constitution, advised by Buchanan, so that post-Pinochet the "capitalist class would be permanently entrenched in power" in which, adds Sam Tanenhaus, "labor unions were banned and social security and healthcare were privatized."
With the Project 2025 blueprint, Trump, Musk, and their Republican Party followers embracing similar authoritarian rule, that program is on speed dial. A populist uprising, which ultimately deposed Pinochet and other dictators, is the challenge to all of us. Fortunately, street protests are increasing, as is a voter response, demonstrated by the electoral trouncing of Trump and Musk's handpicked candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, a positive sign in troubled times.
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Watchdogs Renew Warnings of 'Profoundly Unqualified' Dr. Oz After Senate Hearing
"Between his massive conflicts of interest across the healthcare sector and his endorsement of further privatizing Medicare, Oz would be a threat to the health of tens of millions of Americans," said one opponent.
Mar 14, 2025
Progressive watchdog organizations responded to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee's Friday hearing for Dr. Mehmet Oz by again sounding the alarm about the heart surgeon and former television host nominated to lead a key federal healthcare agency.
Since President Donald Trumpannounced Oz as his nominee for administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last November, opponents have spotlighted the doctor's promotion of unproven products, investments in companies with interests in the federal agency, and support for expanding Medicare Advantage during an unsuccessful U.S. Senate run in 2022.
"Dr. Oz's career promoting dubious medical treatments and pseudoscience often for personal financial gain should immediately disqualify him from serving in any public health capacity, let alone in a top administration health post," Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk said in a Friday statement.
"Dr. Oz's nomination is part of President Trump's grand plan to enrich his corporate donors and wealthy friends while the rest of us get higher costs, less coverage, and weakened protections."
In December, Carrk's group found that based on disclosures from Oz's 2022 run against U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), the Republican doctor reported "up to $56 million in investments in three companies" with direct CMS interests—including Sharecare, which became the "exclusive in-home care supplemental benefit program" for 1.5 million Medicare Advantage enrollees.
A spokesperson said at the time that Oz has since divested from Sharecare. However, critics have still expressed concern about how the nominee's confirmation could boost Republican efforts to expand Medicare Advantage—health insurance plans for seniors administered by private companies rather than the government.
"As a self-interested advocate of privatizing Medicare at a higher cost and more denials of care for seniors, Dr. Oz is surely eager to enact the Trump-Republican budget plan to gut Medicare and Medicaid and jeopardize health coverage for millions of Americans—all to pay for more tax breaks for billionaires and price gouging corporations," said Carrk. "Dr. Oz's nomination is part of President Trump's grand plan to enrich his corporate donors and wealthy friends while the rest of us get higher costs, less coverage, and weakened protections—especially those with preexisting conditions."
As he faces Senate confirmation, remember that Dr. Oz: -Pushed Medicare privatization plans on his show -Owns ~$600k in stock in private insurers -Has ties to pyramid scheme companies that promote fake medical cures His main qualification to oversee CMS is loyalty to Trump.
— Robert Reich ( @rbreich.bsky.social) March 14, 2025 at 1:41 PM
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, has been similarly critical of Oz, and remained so after senators questioned him on Friday, saying in a statement that "Mehmet Oz showed he is profoundly unqualified to lead any part of our healthcare system, let alone an agency as important as CMS."
"Between his massive conflicts of interest across the healthcare sector and his endorsement of further privatizing Medicare, Oz would be a threat to the health of tens of millions of Americans," Weissman warned. "Privatized Medicare Advantage plans deliver inferior care and cost taxpayers nearly $100 billion annually in excess costs."
"It is time for President Trump to put down the remote, stop finding nominees on television, and instead nominate people with actual experience and a belief in the importance of protecting crucial health programs like Medicare and Medicaid," he argued, taking aim at not only the president but also his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE) and, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist now running the Department of Health and Human Services.
Weissman declared that "Trump, Musk, and RFK Jr. fail to put the American people first as they seek to gut agencies and make dangerous cuts to health programs to fund tax cuts for billionaires. Oz indicated he would not oppose such cuts, bringing more destruction to lifesaving programs. Oz has no place in government and should be roundly rejected by every senator."
During a Friday exchange with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the committee's ranking member, Oz refused to decisively commit to opposing cuts to Medicaid. As the Alliance for Retired Americans highlighted, Oz kept that up when given opportunities to revise his answer by Sens. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.).
Other moments from the hearing that garnered attention included Oz's exchange with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) about Affordable Care Act tax credits and Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) calling out the doctor for his unwillingness "to take accountability for" his "promotion of unproven snake oil remedies" to millions of TV viewers.
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