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health and human services
Trump’s Attack on Science Will Leave Us All Sicker
Budget cuts and layoffs at major U.S. public health agencies threaten our health and well-being and will hobble scientific progress and innovation.
Jun 22, 2025
The Trump administration’s evisceration of the federal agencies that protect our health and environment is a full-throttled attack on science that will set our nation back for years, if not decades to come.
The illegal firings of thousands of employees across Health and Human Services’ (HHS) 13 divisions, the freezing of government contracts, attacks on universities, and cuts to billions in research dollars will have profound effects on our health and well-being, economic competitiveness, and standing as a world leader in science.
And the wrecking ball has just begun swinging. HHS is slated to shed 20,000 employees, or one-quarter of its dedicated workforce, and see its budget cut by 26%.
At its worst, the dismantling of federal agencies like the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration is cruelly calculated to hurt those most vulnerable in our society—the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.
A disdain for independent science and expertise is seemingly a root cause of the actions. As Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher, Science journals said at this year’s annual meeting in Boston, “Science and engineering and medicine are searches for truth, facts, and objectivity. We live in a time when that seems under threat, and we need to be able to say that.”
To his point, a May 23 Executive Order puts science under the control of politicians by giving presidential appointees broad latitude to police scientific research and conduct and punish alleged violations of its Orwellian “Gold Standard Science.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of HHS, has already acted on the EO by firing the entire advisery committee that helps guide vaccine policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Seventeen highly qualified, evidence-based physicians and researchers, many with decades of expertise, are to be replaced with individuals aligned with Kennedy’s anti-vaccination ideology.
The president’s appointment of Kennedy, a lawyer with no scientific training, to lead the HHS is itself an attack on expertise and truth. In four short months, Kennedy has made ill-informed decisions from announcing a change in Covid-19 vaccine policy without notifying the CDC, to offering a Florida sanctuary for Canadian ostriches exposed to bird flu, to ending the development of a vaccine for the H5N1 virus, even as researchers demonstrate its ability to rapidly spread through airborne transmission.
Science is clearly taking a backseat to grandstanding, and the consequences could be deadly.
At its best, the demolition of our public health and research institutions shows an indifference to the pain and suffering that may fall on Americans when the agencies that keep our food safe, water clean, and protect us from deadly diseases are kneecapped. At its worst, the dismantling of federal agencies like the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration is cruelly calculated to hurt those most vulnerable in our society—the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.
Americans are already sicker and die younger in comparison with other wealthy nations, according to a 2024 report by the Commonwealth Fund. Life expectancy is 4.1 years shorter in the U.S. compared with our peer nations, and maternal mortality, for instance, is more than three times higher than in Europe. The Trump administration’s attacks on science and medicine will only worsen these gaps.
Lawsuits challenging the legality of the administration’s executive orders are moving through the court system, but we do not yet know how all of this will play out.
Already the damages are taking a toll, with NIH being especially hard hit. With an annual budget of $47 billion, the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research and development. It’s no coincidence that the world’s leading medical labs are located in the U.S., or that our research benefits people across the globe.
The Trump administration plans to cut NIH’s budget by $18 billion, or about 40%, and to consolidate its 27 institutes and centers into just eight. At least 2,100 NIH research grants have been terminated thus far, totaling $9.5 billion.
With at least 1,200 staff laid off all at once, and thousands more voluntarily resigning, the loss of institutional knowledge and medical expertise is staggering. The full extent of the brain drain is unknown because NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya has yet to report the total number of staff losses.
One of NIH’s critical roles is to fund the basic science research that underpins development of drugs and therapeutics, long before the private sector takes an interest. Companies take that basic science and further develop and commercialize vaccines, drugs, and therapies that save lives. Funding for the grants that the NIH provides these labs, universities, and institutions has largely been frozen for the past month, as part of the administration’s war on universities, even though a federal judge ordered a release of the money. Billions of biomedical research dollars allocated to Harvard, Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Columbia, and Princeton are being withheld.
The agency has reportedly stopped vetting future studies on cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and other illnesses and slashed the programs for cancer and Alzheimer’s research.
The Trump administration also cut the overhead rate that NIH pays to research universities to keep the lights on, computers running, and lab equipment maintained from between 40% and 70% to 15%. Such deep cuts will lead to even more layoffs, and research could grind to a halt.
While a U.S. District Court ruled the change was “arbitrary and capricious,” it’s unclear whether the Trump administration will reverse the policy.
Halting research will have profound impacts on the American health system and on our health.
It will disrupt local economies and hurt our overall competitiveness. Every dollar that NIH spends on research generates more than two dollars in economic activity, not to mention the patents and biomedical startups that ensue.
Some U.S. universities are reducing or halting their PhD admissions as a consequence. Doctoral students—our scientific future—are watching their dreams die.
“Many are right now questioning the viability of being a scientist in the U.S. going forward,” Carole Labonne, developmental and stem cell biologist at Northwestern University, said in a PBS interview. We could see a brain drain in the U.S., as young scientists choose a different career path or choose another country in which to build their career.
And NIH is but one federal agency that the Trump administration is taking a chain saw to. Cuts at the Food and Drug Administration could have immediate impacts on our food safety, at a time when food contamination outbreaks are on the rise. Staff with technical expertise in nutrition, infant formula, and food safety response have been cut.
Similarly, at the CDC, staff cuts and contract freezes are coming at a time when the nation is experiencing an H5N1 outbreak in poultry and dairy cattle that may well lead to another pandemic, an unprecedented spread of measles in 33 states, and a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas. The CDC plays a vital role, working with states and communities to understand where disease is, how to prevent it, and how to react. Simply put, we are losing people on the front lines of keeping people healthy.
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RFK Jr.’s Guide to Making America Sick Again
Building on his longstanding anti-vaxxing crusade, Kennedy has followed a multi-step program that will worsen the next outbreak.
Jun 15, 2025
Someone should have told Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the last pandemic probably cost him the presidency in 2020.
Building on his longstanding anti-vaxxing crusade, Kennedy has followed a three-step program that will worsen the next outbreak.
Step 1: Reduce vaccine availability. Three weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—one of Kennedy’s HHS agencies—announced that for healthy Americans under 65, Covid-19 vaccines will not be approved until they pass large scale and time-consuming clinical trials. That is a daunting obstacle.
Kennedy said that the firings were necessary to restore public trust in vaccines. They do the opposite.
Step 2: Reduce vaccine eligibility. The following week, Kennedy announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend the Covid-19 vaccine for children and pregnant women. Within days, the CDC had to walk it back somewhat, stating that whether to vaccinate a child should be the product of “shared decision-making” involving parents and physicians. But pregnant women remain in the limbo world of “no recommendation.” In any event, the negative impact on overall public health will be enormous.
Step 3: Eliminate vaccine expertise. On June 9, Kennedy fired the entire CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—all 17 of them. This committee of outside experts reviews the most recent data on all vaccines to assess safety, efficacy, and clinical need. It develops a recommended guidance schedule for all vaccines, including seasonal flu shots and Covid-19 boosters. Physicians rely on that guidance in counseling patients, and insurance companies and government programs use it to determine the vaccines they will cover. Committee members received their termination notices via email sent two hours after Kennedy announced their firing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
With Kennedy’s selection of his first eight replacements on June 11, we’re getting a sense of the disaster that will accompany Step 4.
Action Based on Lies
Kennedy’s stated justifications for terminating every member of the vaccine advisory committee are a combination of lies, half-truths, and misinformation.
Fact: Committee members are screened for major conflicts of interest. They cannot hold stock or serve on advisory boards or bureaus affiliated with vaccine manufacturers. If members have a conflict of interest, they disclose it and recuse themselves from related votes.
Lie: But Kennedy asserted falsely that most members of the committee had received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies. “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” he said falsely.
Fact: Individual working groups may meet in private, but committee meetings and members’ materials are public. Over several days of meetings, they review safety and effectiveness data, debate policy, hear from experts, and entertain public comment.
Lie: Kennedy asserted falsely that the committee worked secretly “behind closed doors.”
Misinformation/half-truth: According to The New York Times, “Kennedy claimed that 97% of financial disclosure forms from committee members had omissions. But the statistic came from an inspector general’s report in 2009, which found that 97% of the forms had errors, such as missing dates or information in the wrong section, not significant financial conflicts.”
Kennedy said that the firings were necessary to restore public trust in vaccines. They do the opposite. Thanks in large measure to Kennedy’s years of anti-vaxxing leadership, support for vaccinating children is eroding. Now he can stack the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee—the key medical and scientific body responsible for determining which vaccines protect and promote public health.
Seen Enough Yet, Sen. Cassidy?
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the physician who reluctantly provided the key vote that resulted in Kennedy’s Senate confirmation, sees the mess. He was instrumental in creating it. Cassidy could have killed Kennedy’s nomination and thought seriously about doing so.
But like almost all Republicans in the Senate, his spine failed him. Before voting on Kennedy’s nomination, Sen. Cassidy took the Senate floor to explain his decision. He said that Kennedy had assured him that, if confirmed, he would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.”
Reacting to Kennedy’s mass firings, Sen. Cassidy posted on X:
“Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion…”
Two days later, Sen. Cassidy’s fears came to life.
On June 11, Kennedy named eight replacements. Among them are anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theorists, vaccine misinformation promoters, a co-author of and a signatory to the pandemic-era Great Barrington Declaration that recommended widespread exposure to Covid-19 as strategy for dealing with the outbreak (instead of widespread vaccination), and individuals who lack the expertise required for the board’s task. One new member testified as an expert witness in a case against Merck over its Gardasil vaccine (for HPV)—mass tort litigation that Kennedy played a key role in organizing.
Steps 5, 6,…
Kennedy included 4 of the 8 new members in the dedication of his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a physician and scientist who reviewed it for the Claremont Review of Books, observed, “When I looked up at random five of the medical papers Kennedy cites, I found that he had misrepresented all of them… He asserts things that are simply not true.”
Kennedy is at it again. Announcing his selections on X, he wrote, “The slate includes highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians.”
Do you agree, Sen. Cassidy?
Kennedy’s vaccine advisory committee meets on June 25-27. We should all fear the outcome.
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Bobby Kennedy Jr. Makes Eugenics Great Again at Health and Human Services
RFK Jr. has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience.
May 17, 2025
Charles Fremont Dight has been reincarnated in the worm-gnawed brain of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. A medical professor at the University of Minnesota, Dight hoped to rid society of its unfit members. Dight, an eccentric who lived for a time in a treehouse, wrote about these unfit people in such publications as "Increase of the Unfit, A Social Menace," and "A Proper Function of Society is to Control Reproduction." Like other eugenicists, Dight believed in stronger immigration laws to keep the unfit aliens, but emphatically not people of Anglo-Saxon "stock," out of the country. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising the Fuhrer's efforts to "stamp out mental inferiority."
Eugenics, a mainstream science in the early 20th century, sought restrictive marriage laws, isolation of the "unfit" in special colonies for the "feeble minded," and forced sterilization to shield society from the cost of caring for its most vulnerable citizens. Recent immigrants with poor English, children who had what are now recognized as learning disabilities, Down syndrome Americans, and many others were at risk of being paraded before eugenics courts for summary judgment and sent off to isolation colonies. Once removed from society, the eugenicists claimed, those with better bloodlines would be freed of their burden to care for them.
A Registry of Eugenic Discrimination
Bobby Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience. Bobby Jr. wants to identify citizens with autism and place them in some kind of registry. He ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to build "a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables," to determine the root causes of autism spectrum disorder, and to give Bobby and his team of autism falsifiers data drawn from public and private sources in violation of federal privacy and security rules. (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently signed an executive order to block the federal government from collecting these data related to autism and to protect "dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination" of Illinois residents.
Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded."
The HSS database, like those of the eugenicists, will be subjective and impressionistic. U.S. eugenicists built a registry for the unfit at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York under director Harry Laughlin. Laughlin and his poorly trained minions assembled index cards about American families, often from a cursory glance at a person's face and carriage, to create genetic family trees. The ERO believed they had proved a huge number of people carrying hereditary disease who could be identified to be isolated or sterilized; 80,000 Americans were sterilized.
Racism and Pseudoscience in HHS
Bobby Jr. shares the eccentricities and racism of the eugenists. He cut up whale skull found on the beach near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, apparently because he likes to study animal skulls and skeletons, tied it to the roof of the family car, and drove it back to New York, while the rank "whale juice" poured into the car and onto his children. Bobby's interest in skulls may have been kindled by the work of craniologist Samuel Morton (1799-1851). In his Crania Americana Morton set forth a hierarchy of intelligence with Native Americans and Blacks at the bottom to justify their enslavement, removal, and other disturbing acts of violence against them.
Building on Morton's thesis, racist scientists and eugenicists documented lack of mental acuity among African Americans. They assigned Blacks special diseases and susceptibilities, one of which, drapetomania, led slaves to run away from cruel owners; another ordained syphilis as a "Negro disease." These racists believed that Blacks have a higher pain tolerance and weaker lungs that could be strengthened through hard labor (slavery). Bobby Jr. claims that Black people have a stronger immune system than white people and thus should receive vaccines on a different schedule. He observed that "to particular antigens, Blacks have a much stronger reaction." Bobby Jr. has said that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS, and he reiterates the fiction that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Another leg in the eugenicists' program was anti-immigration laws. ERO director Laughlin testified before the U.S. Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924 and its restrictions on admission to the U.S. of "races" considered inferior to the Anglo stock. On the basis of flawed data, Laughlin told Congress that recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were "socially inadequate," and tended to "degeneracy, shiftlessness, alcoholism, and insubordination," all of which were supposedly genetic traits. The 1924 act was easily passed signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge who believed that "America must be kept American" and that "biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
No wonder Donald Trump selected Bobby Jr. to head HHS. Trump began his first presidential campaign commenting with conviction that Mexican immigrants were drug dealers and rapists. Trump draws on the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and the racial hygienists of Nazi Germany where a person's genes or bloodline determine his or her capacity for success or violence. Trump said, "You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes." But the Trump family has good genes, although his convictions for sex and financial crimes might offer counter evidence: "We're smart people… We're like racehorses." During his ongoing campaign against undocumented aliens and citizens with foreign-sounding names, Trump ordered white South Africans to be given asylum in the U.S., but pointedly not Afghans who fought for freedom against the Taliban, Mexicans, or any other "races."
The Pseudoscience of Mercury-Caused Autism
The entire premise of Bobby's registry is the fully discredited assertion that vaccinations cause autism which is based on a retracted and discredited 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. Wakefield combed his data, weeded out some children who didn't fit, and carefully included others. Further, his research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
Like Dight, Laughlin, and other eugenicists, Bobby lies and misinterprets data to fit his predetermined and erroneous conclusions that vaccines cause autism. In one article Bobby "claimed that the amount of ethyl mercury in vaccines was 187 times greater than the recommended limit, when it was only 1.4 times greater." He cited one study to contend that tuna sandwiches laced with mercury being fed to two-month-old babies. There is nothing of the sort in the study.
Eugenics and the Decline of Public Health
Bobby's strange mix of false science will exacerbate such public health crises as the ongoing measles epidemic as confused parents deny their children life-saving vaccinations. Bobby Jr. hates vaccines. He referred to the Covid-19 vaccine as "the deadliest vaccine ever made." The vaccine saved perhaps as many as 20 million lives. Kennedy has said that he only drinks raw milk. Doing so puts people at risk of foodborne illness, since pasteurization kills off pathogens. Drinking it may increase the risk of the spread of bird flu. Bobby wants to remove fluoride from drinking water and claims bone cancer, IQ loss, thyroid disease, and other things may result from its use. This is untrue. Fluoride prevents cavities.
Kennedy's fabrications about autism, mercury, and other topics recall the misguided work of eugenicist Henry Goddard. Goodard was the director of research at New Jersey's Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. He opened an early clinical laboratory to study intellectual disabilities. Tracing the lineage of one of his young patients and building her family tree back to the Revolutionary War, Goddard concluded that intelligence, sanity, and morality were hereditary, and every effort should be undertaken to keep the "feeble-minded" from procreating to eliminate them from the breeding pool. His study on the "Kallikaks" (1912) used touched-up photos to show the Kallikaks as inferior creatures.
Always lurking in the minds of this MAGA government are racist scientific ideas about breeding and innate intelligence; about the evils of immigrants; and about the need to revitalize science away from rigorous hypothesis and testing toward conspiracy, pseudoscience, and eugenics. Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded." Perhaps the registry will confirm what is well known: that increasing numbers of people identified with autism is largely to do with increased screening for and greater identification of people with autism. There is no epidemic. But, like a good eugenicist, he has determined his conclusions before the study begins.
Happy measles, everyone! Or, as Donald Trump says, he only hires the best people.
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Trump Is Robbing Public Health to Pay for His Deportation Conveyer Belt
For $40 billion-worth of health cuts to come as our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty.
May 10, 2025
The Trump administration wants to spend $45 billion to build an inhumane deportation industry while planning to cut at least $40 billion in life-saving programs from the Department of Health and Human Services. The juxtaposition is a near-perfect gauge of how heartless our government has become in the richest nation on Earth.
For deportation, the administration virtually froths for an Amazon-like fulfillment center to robotically sort out handcuffed humans and shuffle them down the aisles onto trucks and planes.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), recently told private security companies seeking contracts that ICE needs to be “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours… trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe is really something for us.”
So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport U.S. citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.
That is really something, on many levels. One is the sheer immorality of reducing humans to shrink-wrapped products to shove onto conveyor belts and stack on forklifts. Another is that so far, ICE is as indiscriminate and incompetent as Amazon is efficient. President Donald Trumppromised “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Border czar Tom Homan said the United States government was “targeting the worst of the worst” for deportation.
Instead, there have been notorious incidents of students being rounded up for exercising their right to free speech and deportations of untold numbers of people without U.S. criminal records. One recent notorious case is that of 238 mostly Venezuelan migrants deported to prisons in El Salvador; Bloomberg News found that only about 10% of them had a criminal record in the United States. The legality of many deportations is highly questionable, as the White House has defied court orders to turn back deportation planes and return wrongly deported people back to the United States
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, founded at Syracuse University, ICE issued 18,000 “detainer” requests for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to hold people for possible deportation in the first month of the new Trump administration. That was more than triple the detainers issued in the first full month of the Biden administration, which faced its own fierce criticism from immigration rights advocates.
ICE says detainers are mostly for people who have been convicted of burglaries and robberies, kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, weapons offenses, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. But only 28% of people targeted by a detainer in the first month of the new Trump administration had a prior conviction in the United States, with the most frequent offenses involving drunk driving and other traffic violations.
As for the “worst of the worst,” just one half of 1% of detainers involved a convicted rapist or murderer. So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport U.S. citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.
That the nation would spend $45 billion on this malicious ruination of lives and destruction of families looks even more unconscionable when President Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. want to cut $40 billion from a department that says its mission is to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”
A review of the proposed cuts—as detailed in a 64-page memorandum that was leaked to the media—shows how profoundly the Trump administration is about to betray that mission.
Cuts Despite Deadly Toll
The administration would end the HIV Epidemic Initiative, even though nearly 5,000 people a year in the United States still die with HIV/AIDS as the underlying cause. Despite many advances in HIV treatment that allow patients longer lives, there were still 38,000 HIV diagnoses in 2022, half of them in Southern states. While 1 in 5 people in the United States with HIV are still not able to access treatment.
The administration would kill the Minority AIDS Initiative, even though the disease is rife with gross racial disparities. Though African Americans are 12% of the nation’s population, they accounted for 37% of new HIV diagnoses in 2022.
The cuts would eliminate the division of Firearm Injury and Mortality Research. In doing so, the administration is imposing an ignorance that will likely further paralyze any debate on gun control, since the division’s mission is to provide data “to inform action” on a major cause of death in the United States. Last year, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence an “urgent public health crisis,” as gun deaths soared to a record 48,830 in 2021.
All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing.
New research funded by HHS’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that emergency rooms were receiving a gunshot victim every 30 minutes in nine Southern and Western states and the District of Columbia. Even though murders have subsided somewhat from a record 21,000 in 2021 during the Covid-19 crisis, gun suicides kept rising to a record 27,300 in 2023.
Yet, HHS has scrubbed Murthy’s advisory from its website.
The Youth Violence Division would also be eliminated, even though gun deaths are the leading cause of death for youth under 18, killing 2,500 kids a year. Due to the Trump administration’s demands to end equity across all public policy, HHS proposes to eliminate the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. More than half of Black youth who die before the age of 18 are victims of gun violence, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Black youth are six times more likely to die a gun death than white youth.
Besides the 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, another 22,000 suicides occurred that year from other methods, primarily suffocation and intentional poisoning. About another 100,000 people died in 2022 from unintentional overdoses of fentanyl, methamphetamine, prescription opioids, cocaine, heroin, and other substances.Yet, despite the approximately 150,000 combined deaths a year from suicides and overdoses, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy propose to eliminate dozens of mental health and substance abuse training and treatment programs for children, families, people of color, people in the criminal justice system, first responders, community recovery support, and crisis response.
As if the Flint Water Crisis never happened, HHS under the Trump administration would end the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program and the Lead Exposure Registry. That is despite a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal that showed half of the U.S. population was exposed to high levels of lead in early childhood, and a 2016 Reuters analysis that 3,000 communities across the nation had higher lead levels than Flint. A 2022 study found that without stronger congressional action to protect children from the brain damage of lead exposure, the nation will “needlessly absorb” about $80 billion in annual costs to the nation’s economy, double the proposed cuts to HHS.
HHS would end the direct involvement of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in routine inspections of food facilities, trusting an uneven patchwork of state vigilance on bacteria, parasites, and viruses in our food systems. Never mind that the CDC says there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness every year, costing 3,000 lives and requiring 128,000 hospitalizations. A study last year done by researchers from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Colorado School of Public Health found that food illnesses cost the nation $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, premature deaths, and ongoing chronic illnesses.
Yet, HHS wants to cut $40 billion from the budget.
Cuts Range From Chronic Diseases to Drowning Programs
The Trump administration and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, have disingenuously stated that funding and eliminations of departments are targeting waste and fraud. One need not be a math major to see that what they propose is the opposite.
For instance, the cuts would eliminate the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, even though cancer, heart disease, and stroke kill more than 1.5 million people a year in the United States, and cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars a year in healthcare costs and lost productivity. Many of those diseases, along with diabetes and obesity, are often preventable, and the national center has been a resource for programs to reduce smoking, promote physical activity, lower alcohol intake, and improve nutrition.
The administration wants to eliminate the National Institutes for Nursing Research and several other nursing programs. This is in the face of studies that show that lower nurse-to-patient ratios and lower patient waiting times (because of more nurses) can save a hospital a couple of million dollars a year. It is also in the face of a 2021 study that found that in New York state alone, lower nurse-to-patient ratios could save more than 4,000 lives and more than $700 million over a two-year period.
The administration is so heartless that it even wants to eliminate its program for drowning, even though 4,500 people a year perish underwater, even though it is the top cause of death for preschoolers, and even though 55% of U.S. adults have never taken a swim lesson.
All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing. It should be unfathomable that the nation would let its guard down after Flint, risking stunted brain development in untold children.
For these $40 billion-worth of cuts to come at the same time our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings “all over the globe” to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty in the developed world. The government wants a conveyor belt of deportation as it dismantles health systems in the name of efficiency.
That would be quite the fulfillment center. Immigrants are forklifted into misery. The rest of us are being carted into a cavalier world by a government that clearly does not care how many people die.
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America’s Safety Is Fragile; Trump Is Tearing Down the Systems That Protect It
The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight.
May 05, 2025
America in 2025 is safer than it’s been in years. After a devastating surge during the early pandemic—when the U.S. homicide rate rose more than 30%—homicide rates have since plummeted. In 2024 alone, they dropped 16% nationally, one of the sharpest declines since the FBI began keeping national data.
This progress isn’t happenstance. It’s the direct result of deliberate investments in policy, research, and community-led strategies that addressed the underlying reasons for crime and violence. This progress is now under direct assault as the Trump administration has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. In the last two weeks, the Justice Department canceled hundreds of critical grants to local governments and community organizations that fund violence prevention and public safety programs. Hundreds of National Science Foundation grants were terminated, including my own, following infiltration from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. If these rollbacks continue, we risk reversing years of progress and returning to a more violent, less stable future.
In Camden, New Jersey—where I teach at Rutgers University and serve as director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center—the turnaround has been particularly dramatic. Just over a decade ago, Camden was written off as the “murder capital of the country.” In 2013, the small city of 75,000 people saw 57 homicides. In 2024, that number dropped to 17—a historic low. Today, fewer families are grieving, and fewer children are growing up in the shadow of violence. For a city long abandoned by political will and public imagination, this transformation offers a lesson in what’s possible when communities and institutions work together.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage.
The progress in Camden was not inevitable. It was built—piece by piece—through hard-won investments in community violence prevention and a complete overhaul of the city’s police force. And in recent years, we’ve seen similar progress unfold across the country in reducing violence—driven by a surge in federal investment and coordination.
In the wake of the pandemic, the Biden administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the kind of labor-intensive work that makes communities safer through the Community-Based Violence Intervention Initiative and provisions within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Laws were passed to extend background checks, implement life-saving red flag laws, and crack down on gun traffickers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulated ghost guns and the kits used to assemble them, curbing the surge of untraceable firearms on our streets. The White House even established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to lead these efforts. Federal funding allowed grassroots organizations to hire street outreach workers and get help to those affected by violence before more harm was done.
States and cities followed suit, creating their own offices of violence prevention and refocusing law enforcement efforts on the those at highest risk while improving community relations. For the first time in decades, a coherent, multi-sector approach to safety led by the federal government was beginning to take hold. It was working.
All of that is now under threat.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. The administration’s attacks are wide-ranging but the bigger picture is what matters. These aren’t isolated cuts or rollbacks. Taken together, they amount to a deliberate dismantling of the very infrastructure that underpins public safety in this country.
On his first day in office, Trump shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated massive layoffs, including nearly the entire Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Programs that tracked injuries and deaths—like the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS)—have gone dark. Researchers at universities across the country have had their federal funding frozen, stalled, or revoked, often with no official explanation. A group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, has even called for a complete ban on federal research aimed at preventing gun violence—an attack not just on science, but on the very idea that violence is a problem we can solve.
The Department of Justice has also reversed course. A zero-tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers, established under the Biden administration, has been eliminated. The result: Dealers who sell firearms without background checks or falsify records are now far less likely to lose their licenses. Attorney General Pam Bondi is reviewing lifesaving gun regulations, including a rule closing the gun show loophole and a ban on certain AR-style firearm attachments used in mass shootings. These policies were hard-fought and evidence-based. Now, they’re on the chopping block.
None of this is abstract. Research, policy, and funding are what make real-world safety possible. Without them, outreach workers and police officers can’t do their jobs. Emergency room partnerships break down. Communities lose tools to anticipate and prevent violence. Safety doesn’t just happen. It is produced through effort, coordination, and care. And when those systems collapse, people die.
Violence is not just a crime issue. It is a preventable threat to public health, even if the administration denies it. It spreads, it scars, and it sickens. It takes our children, hurts those who are most marginalized, and it divides us. The recent gains in safety are fragile—hard-earned, but easily reversed. If the systems that made that progress possible are dismantled, the violence will return. We can’t take this moment for granted, and we cannot afford to stand by while it’s undone.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage. The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight. The cost is too great. The consequences, unthinkable. It’s time to reclaim public safety as a public good, and to fight—loudly—for the systems that make peace possible.
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The Lessons of Covid-19 and Its Long Haul: We Need Community Care
As Trump further weakens public health infrastructure, let us renew our attention to keeping each other safe, supporting the most vulnerable among us, and preventing more mass disablement.
Apr 10, 2025
The Trump administration’s decision to close the Heath and Human Services Office of Long COVID Research and Practice deals yet another blow to our already embattled public health system. This initiative, like the recently terminated Advisory Committee on Long COVID, had signaled much-needed attention to infection-associated chronic diseases, largely overlooked by the U.S. medical establishment.
An estimated 7.5% of adults in the United States suffer from Long Covid, which can affect multiple organ systems with over 200 symptoms from brain fog and sleep problems to joint pain and bedridden fatigue. A diagnosis of Long Covid describes symptoms that continue at least three months after contracting Covid-19. For some, symptoms eventually go away. But for others, symptoms get worse and, frighteningly, new symptoms appear—with no end in sight. Long Covid is variable and unpredictable. I know this because it happened to me.
Covid-19 laid bare our fragile health systems and the necessity of caring for one another.
After escaping Covid-19 for over three years, I developed a moderate case, with fever, cough, body ache, and fatigue. Four months later, when I had almost complete recovered, I suddenly took a turn for the worse. Over the past 15 months I have steadily improved, yet my life remains significantly changed. Aches and pains, post-exertional malaise, and a weakened immune system circumscribe my daily activities. Alongside the challenges of navigating the health conditions themselves is my limited ability to keep Covid-safe amid waning attention to Covid-19—as our government and institutions have abandoned Covid precautions. This puts us all at higher risk of Covid-19 infection, and for those of us with Long Covid this risk is exacerbated—each additional reinfection with Covid exposes us to further complications with Long Covid.
In such a climate of pandemic abandonment, punctuated as early as 2022 when then-President Joe Biden issued his dangerously delusional statement that we were post-pandemic, we can rely even less than before on our government and institutions to save us from either Covid-19 or Long Covid. We must prioritize cultivating our own spaces of care—focusing on prevention, mutual aid, and accommodations for the sick and disabled.
We Need to Cultivate Spaces of Collective Care
The earliest lessons of the pandemic remain true today—we can lower transmission rates through masking, physical distancing, and meeting online, among other precautions. While workplaces, businesses, and public spaces have varied in their implementation of Covid-19 safety, social justice groups, led by disability justice, have led the way from the start.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, my racial justice collective applied our principles of care and justice to Covid-19 safety. We pivoted meetings and gatherings online to Zoom, made use of its breakout rooms for one-on-one debriefs, the chat box for running insights and snark, and the emoji feature for added interpersonal expressiveness. As we learned new ways to build community, it made us more inclusive: Folks who otherwise had barriers to attending in-person—whether that be due to illness and disability or just being out-of-town—could now attend remotely. When gatherings needed to be in-person, like the summer 2020 protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we still prioritized Covid-19 precautions. Actions either followed traditional modes of large gatherings but required (and provided) masks, or were smaller so that activists could maintain physical distance. For those who couldn’t participate safely due to Covid-19 or physical disability, remote action was possible, such as handling back-end prep work or coordinating check-ins.
These community care practices remain important even during periods of low community transmission—they make spaces accessible to all.
We Must Hold Ourselves Accountable
Five years into the pandemic, even progressive activist groups have moved away from these lessons. Many no longer require masks at meetings and gatherings, or prioritize online options. This leaves each of us to fend for ourselves individually, abandoning the principles of collective care and disability justice—from access intimacy to “we keep us safe”—that had made such in-roads in our communities. If we cannot collectively learn from this “mass disabling event” of our lifetime, when will we? And if progressive activist groups whose common mission it is to make a world free from oppression—where caring for one another is the dominant ethos—ditch pandemic precautions, what hope is there?
To be sure, we still need to push institutions at the local and federal levels to make available personal protective equipment and resources for frontline workers, better access to healthcare, more research on Long Covid and other underfunded chronic conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). These actions would certainly help support the many biomedical doctors who toil tirelessly for treatments despite biomedicine’s limited approaches to chronic illness, as well as the Chinese medicine and other non-biomedicine doctors, not to mention the patient advocacy groups, who have arguably carried the bulk of the care and treatment for Long Covid sufferers.
I believe we have the most control over our small communities of care. Covid-19 laid bare our fragile health systems and the necessity of caring for one another—and for a time many of us heeded that call. Let us renew our attention to keeping each other safe, supporting the most vulnerable among us, and preventing more mass disablement. And for us activists who say we want to create better worlds, let’s model for everyone else how it’s done.
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A Cruel and Frozen Heart: RFK Jr. Decimates LIHEAP Heating Assistance Program
Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary has overseen an attack on the program that helps millions of low-income individuals and families stay warm in winter and cool in summer. Does it get worse than this?
Apr 04, 2025
President Donald Trump has caused so much devastation over the last several weeks that it is hard to calculate the loss. It is easy to lose sight of the people who are being hurt. Earlier this week, the Trump administration's Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a vast restructuring of the agency. As a result, literally thousands of workers were fired and entire sections of HHS eliminated and countless programs—spanning the gamut from world health to food safety—negatively impacted.
One of the programs devastated was the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program (LIHEAP) which helps low-income individuals and families pay for heating or cooling homes. According to the New York Times, the entire staff of LIHEAP was fired. LIHEAP helps over six million low-income people and has an annual budget of $4.1 billion.
Over the years, both Republicans and Democrats have supported LIHEAP. The program found supporters in New England who depended on LIHEAP for heating assistance and those in the southwest who used the assistance to help cool their homes. Those days of bipartisan cooperation are long gone.
Unless the cuts to LIHEAP are reversed, April 2025 will end up being a very cruel month for the millions of Americans who depend on LIHEAP...
No one should have been surprised by the severe cuts to LIHEAP. The program was targeted by Project 2025 and by the House Republican Study Committee’s proposed budget last year. Interestingly, this position puts the GOP at odds with utilities/energy companies which support LIHEAP.
In terms of bureaucracy, the LIHEAP staff was very small (25 people) when compared with overall staffing at HHS. Given the number of people LIHEAP helps, the program seems very efficient. Furthermore, LIHEAP serves a vital—that is, life-saving—purpose. The Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey shows that families across the country are having problems affording their energy costs. In October of last year, Louisiana (31%), West Virginia (28.%), and Massachusetts (27%) topped the charts in states with the highest percentage of adults in households that were unable to pay an energy bill in full in the last 12 months.
Congress has already approved $4.1 billion for LIHEAP subsidies and implementation costs for the current fiscal year and about 90% of that amount has already been awarded to the states who administer the grants to individuals in need. However, it is unclear how the rest of the funds will be disbursed as there is no staff to administer the program. It is anyone’s guess as to what happens when the money runs out.
One thing is for sure: If LIHEAP is eliminated, people will die and these will be the most vulnerable among us. In case you are interested in proof of this common-sense conclusion, check out the paper “The Mortality Effects Of Winter Heating Prices” in the Economic Journal.
On Thursday, Kennedy told ABC News that some of the HHS cuts had been made in error and would be rescinded. This whole situation will be clarified when Kennedy testifies on April 10 about the HHS reorganization before the Senate Health Committee. Hopefully, LIHEAP will be one of the programs that was cut in error. Given the fact that Project 2025 singled out LIHEAP, this may be a forlorn hope.
Written just over a hundred years ago, T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland proffered that “April is the cruelest month.” Unless the cuts to LIHEAP are reversed, April 2025 will end up being a very cruel month for the millions of Americans who depend on LIHEAP to stay warm in their homes and survive in this world.
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'Real Danger in This Moment': 1,900 Scientists Issue SOS Over Trump's Attack
"The voice of science must not be silenced," the scientists wrote. "We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation's research enterprise is destroyed."
Mar 31, 2025
With an open letter Monday addressed to the American people, nearly 2,000 scientists sounded the alarm on U.S. President Donald Trump's "wholesale assault" on science—warning that his administration's actions threaten the talent pipeline for the country's future scientists, the nation's "scientific edge," and more.
The 1,900 scientists are all elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—a private, nongovernmental institution established by Congress in the 19th century that aims to "provide independent, objective advice to inform policy with evidence"—though speaking out as individuals in the letter and not the organizations for which they work, the signers represent some of the country's foremost scientists, engineers, and medical researchers.
"For over 80 years, wise investments by the U.S. government have built up the nation's research enterprise, making it the envy of the world," the scientists wrote. "Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds."
"We see real danger in this moment," they added. "We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation's scientific enterprise is being decimated."
Since Trump returned to the White House, funding for the National Institutes of Health—the largest biomedical research funding provider in the country—has plummeted by more than $3 billion compared with grants issued during the same period in 2024, according to The Washington Post.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also announced last week that it intends to lay off 10,000 full-time employees at the department in order to restructure the agency under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Also last week, HHS canceled more than $12 billion in federal funding for state health departments across the nation, money used to track infectious diseases and provide mental health services, addiction treatment, and other critical care.
Meanwhile, the administration has also cut funding on research into specific areas, like vaccine access and HIV/AIDs prevention in young people.
Robert Steinbrook, the health research group director at the watchdog Public Citizen, said Monday the open letter should be "a wake-up call for our leading scientific and medical organizations to show courage and speak out at this critical moment."
According to the scientists, "a climate of fear" has permeated the research community since Trump returned to the White House.
"Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding," they wrote.
The scientists are urging the public speak out against the Trump administration's "assault" on science and called on people to contact their lawmakers in Congress about the matter.
"The voice of science must not be silenced," they wrote. "We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation's research enterprise is destroyed."
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Totalitarian Science in the White House
By promoting pseudoscience, purging government scientists, and censoring their work and speech, U.S. President Donald Trump is following Stalin, Hitler, and Putin’s playbook.
Mar 12, 2025
As he sat in his Kremlin office in autumn 1948, Joseph Stalin faced hard decisions about the dangers facing Soviet science. Spies threatened to steal state secrets. Agents of capitalist ideology promoted false research paradigms. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin dictated real Soviet science. He endorsed the bogus theory of “Lysenkoism” with its rejection of genetics. He oversaw the firing, arrests, and imprisonment of biologists. He next identified so-called materialist state physics that repudiated relativity theory—Albert Einstein was a Jewish theorist, after all. And Stalin shut down cybernetics, which waylaid the development of computers into the 1990s.
Under Hitler, too, the Nazi state imposed restrictions on science owing to prevailing racist, antisemitic ideas. What had once been the world’s greatest scientific establishment was destroyed by ideological interference even before its physical devastation in World War II. Nonpareil U.S. science arose in the postwar years on the foundations of scientific freedom and extensive funding.
Shockingly, U.S. President Donald Trump also pursues pseudoscience through false proclamations. He hopes, with the stroke of a pen, to abolish transgender people, vaccinations, and climate change. To manage research and development, Trump has turned science portfolios over to singularly unqualified ideological agents. And he has adopted authoritarian tactics to control science in two major ways.
Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
First, Trump has purged thousands of scientists. Firings have been promoted as a way to cut waste in the federal government, but reflect the desire of the White House to halt research that Trump and his minions reject ranging from sickle cell medicine to obstetrics and gynecology; from ecology to climate change; and from vaccinations to Alzheimer’s investigations. Trump, still bruised from his failed attempt to force Hurricane Dorian to follow the path of his Sharpie, not scientific forecasts, fired 880 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.
Like under Stalin, no bureaucracy is free from interference: the Food and Drug Administration (to prevent a range of medicines from being used), National Institutes of Health (to cut research on gender, health equity, and environmental justice), U.S. Fish and Wildlife (to limit the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act), the Department of Agriculture (to close down the battle with avian flu), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (to weaken the nation’s nuclear arsenal). The wanton firings include researchers, physicians, nurses, clinicians, and even park rangers and foresters, putting the nation’s natural heritage at risk.
Second, the Trump administration is censoring scientific speech and publication. Such world-leading publications as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report were temporarily shut down. Federal scientists whose work uses “gender” and other suspect words are being required to withdraw in-press articles, and are being prevented from submitting future work using these terms. Zealous Trump acolytes have cleansed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) websites of information about immunization, contraception, racism, and health. Others have removed data on climate on which farmers and others rely. A French university in Marseilles is offering a research haven to U.S. scientists who worry about censorship of their work.
Federal scientific agencies have been told in recent weeks to remove such words as nonbinary, woman, disabled, and elderly from their purview. Only in the 1990s did U.S. scientific administrators and researchers began to redress the heavily skewed underparticipation of women in clinical studies, and the inattention to women’s health issues in the national research agenda. Trump administration policies will return women and minorities to being outsiders in R, D, and employment. Indeed, as in Nazi Germany there are natalist, racial, and homophobic overtones to current Trump scientific protocols, not the least in implicit prohibitions against research involving LGBTQ individuals. Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy asserts that Black people should follow a different vaccine schedule than whites on the basis of his false claims that Blacks need fewer antigens.
The Stalinists, similarly, slowed scientific publication through a censorship bureau called Glavlit. As a result of this censorship, Soviet science failed to perform well by many measures: scientific citation indices, Nobel, and other major international prizes.
To achieve censorship, Trump is pursuing scientific isolation. The Communist Party prevented scientists from attending international conferences from the 1930s until the 1980s, stultifying the development of Soviet science. In the U.S., the White House has embargoed travel funds. The president has closed down conferences and prohibited such groups as an independent expert vaccine panel from meeting which at the very least delays the funding of cutting edge research in all fields. Not content with the natural sciences, like the Stalinists in the 1940s, the administration has turned on the social sciences as well, for example, closing the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.
The impacts are already being felt. Trump has long accepted baseless anti-vaccination propaganda. As a result, the CDC ended a successful flu vaccination campaign, while Trump signed a dictate to prohibit federal funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates in schools. Yet, according to the World Health Organization, over the past 50 years, vaccination against 14 major diseases has directly contributed to reducing infant deaths by 40% globally and saved over 150 million lives. Meanwhile, the worst measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the last 30 years has sickened 125 people, most of them children; measles can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. In a throwback to the medical nonsense suggested by the president to downing bleach to cure Covid-19, Bobby Kennedy is proposing drinking cod liver oil to combat the outbreak.
Engineering is similarly being hit with a funding cudgel, with programs in wind and solar power and high-speed trains cancelled. This can only lead to the end of U.S. scientific priority in a variety of fields, the closing down of promising research directions, and damage to strategic national interests. Personal whims play a role here. Embarrassed by the success of the Chips Act (2022) that rejuvenated the U.S. semiconductor industry, Trump plans to destroy the “horrible, horrible” program.
If Trump seeks contemporary examples of authoritarian interference in modern science, he can look to Russia again. Under President Vladimir Putin, the security police have arrested scientists on accusations of espionage; several have died in custody. In May 2001 the Russian Academy of Sciences ordered specialists to report all their foreign contacts to the authorities for monitoring. Universities followed suit. Next the FSB closed down NGOs. And Russian scientists are again isolated.
Stalin purged his officer corps on the eve of World War II, severely handicapping the Red Army against Nazi Germany. Stalin published a book in 1948 called Marxism and Linguistics to establish himself as the leader in the field. Trump, apparently hoping to be recognized as a scientific expert, recently pontificated on “transgender” mice; of course, he does not understand the value of transgenic research with applications for human health from asthma to chronic wounds to heart disease any more than Stalin fathomed linguistics. But this utterance is in keeping with his firing of military personnel from leadership positions based on pseudoscientific notions of lower intelligence for soldiers of color. Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
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RFK Jr. Will Need a Miracle Cure to Fight Cancer on Trump’s Budget
At the same time Trump is pledging to reverse childhood cancer rates, he and his attack doge Elon Musk are gutting federal health agencies to help pay for huge tax breaks for corporations and the uber rich.
Mar 11, 2025
During his marathon, fact-free speech to Congress last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration plans to address the growing incidence of childhood cancer.
“Since 1975, rates of child cancer have increased by more than 40%,” Trump said. “Reversing this trend is one of the top priorities for our new presidential commission to make America healthy again, chaired by our new Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. …Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”
As usual, Trump got the statistic wrong. In fact, childhood cancer rates increased 33% since 1975, according to a study published in the journal PLOS One in January (and verified by the American Cancer Society), and the uptick in cases can be at least partly attributed to improved detection technology.
What would a major loss of federal scientific expertise mean for HHS Secretary Kennedy’s childhood cancer commission? Given that Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, is not known for paying attention to scientific evidence, it may not matter much.
That said, the PLOS One study did find that some childhood cancers—notably leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, liver tumors, and gonadal tumors—are on the rise, so by all means, the federal government should do more to try to reduce them.
But at the same time Trump is pledging to reverse childhood cancer rates and “get toxins out of our environment,” he and his attack doge Elon Musk are gutting federal health agencies to help pay for huge tax breaks for corporations and the uber rich.
Indiscriminate Cuts Across the Board
All of the agencies that protect public health are on the chopping block.
Just a few weeks ago, for example, his administration illegally fired some 5,200 employees at Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including nearly 1,300 staff members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), roughly a tenth of the agency’s workforce.
Meanwhile, over at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the new administrator, Lee Zeldin, is threatening a budget cut of at least 65%. That would leave the agency with an annual budget of about $3.2 billion, less than a third of its budget in fiscal year (FY) 1970—the year it began—in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars. Such a meager budget would destroy the agency, exactly what the fossil fuel industry-funded Republican Party has been wanting to do for years.
The Trump administration is also trying to ax a key portion of National Institutes of Health (NIH) biomedical research funding, which would undermine any effort to curtail childhood cancer—not to mention research on other deadly diseases.
On February 7, it announced it will cut an estimated $4 billion from NIH grants by capping funding for “indirect” overhead costs that cover such expenses as facilities, electric utilities, and administrative and janitorial services at 15%, half the current average rate. About $26 billion of NIH’s $35 billion in FY2023 grants that went to more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions covered direct costs—researchers and laboratories. The balance—$9 billion—paid for overhead.
Experts warn that without adequate overhead support, researchers would not be able to do their work.
Three days after the administration announced its intention to cut the NIH budget, five medical associations and 22 states filed lawsuits challenging the plan. Later that day, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston granted a temporary restraining order. She followed up on March 5, the day after Trump’s speech to Congress, by filing a preliminary injunction that put the cuts on hold while the lawsuits proceed. “The risk of harm to research institutions and beyond,” Kelley wrote in a 76-page order, “is immediate, devastating, and irreparable.”
It’s 2017 all Over Again (With a Major Difference)
Trump’s zeal to hobble federal medical and scientific research should not come as a surprise. To a great extent, his current budget-chopping campaign reflects the FY2018 budget he proposed in May 2017. That radical proposal called for shrinking the budgets of NIH by 18%; EPA by 31%, the Food and Drug Administration by 31%, and the CDC by 17%, which would have been its lowest budget since 1997. It also called for hacking $610 billion from Medicaid over the following decade on top of an $880-billion cut a Republican healthcare plan advocated.
That budget was dead on arrival, despite the fact that Republicans controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate, albeit by only a 51 to 49 margin. Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, then-chair of the House spending subcommittee that funds NIH, told Scientific American that he did not expect Congress to support Trump’s proposed cuts. Other legislators from both sides of the aisle also rejected the president’s NIH budget proposal. (Nevertheless, Trump’s previous administration did a lot of damage by eliminating or weakening over 100 environmental safeguards.)
Today, Republicans have the White House and slim majorities in both houses of Congress. Unlike 2017, however, congressional Republicans are in lockstep with Trump, and thus far have been cheering him and Musk on from the sidelines as they dismantle the federal government.
What would a major loss of federal scientific expertise mean for HHS Secretary Kennedy’s childhood cancer commission? Given that Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, is not known for paying attention to scientific evidence, it may not matter much. It’s been widely reported that Kennedy has been telling children and adults in Texas to try Vitamin A, cod liver oil, and other dubious treatments if they get measles instead of urging them to get vaccinated, so one could only imagine what he would recommend that parents give their children to protect them from cancer. Aloe? Emu oil? Kombucha? All of the above?
This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.
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