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us department of health and human services
Former Surgeons General Say It's Their Duty to Warn of 'Profound' Threat RFK Jr. Poses to Americans
"Science and expertise have taken a back seat to ideology and misinformation," the former surgeons general warned.
Oct 07, 2025
Six former US surgeons general, who have worked across multiple presidential administrations, said Tuesday that they have a duty to warn Americans that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a danger to the health of the public.
In a joint editorial published by The Washington Post, the former surgeons general, including President Donald Trump's first-term surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said that Kennedy's actions are "endangering the health of the nation" and that his policies represent a "profound, immediate, and unprecedented threat" to public health.
The surgeons general went on to say that they have been watching "with increasing alarm as the foundations of our nation's public health system have been undermined" and "science and expertise have taken a back seat to ideology and misinformation."
They then singled out Kennedy's decades-long obsession with promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, which they said risks bringing back diseases that have long been eradicated in the United States.
"This year, as the United States faced its worst measles outbreak in more than 30 years, Kennedy de-emphasized vaccination and directed agency resources toward unproven vitamin therapies," they wrote. "The result: months-long outbreak, three preventable deaths, and the first measles-related child death in the US in over two decades."
The surgeons general also pointed to Kennedy's decision to link products containing acetaminophen to autism, despite no clear evidence to justify such a claim.
"This move has been widely condemned by the scientific and medical communities, who have pointed out that the available research is inconclusive and insufficient to justify such a warning," they wrote. "In an extraordinary and unprecedented response, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other leading health organizations issued public guidance urging physicians and patients to disregard HHS’s recommendation."
Elsewhere in the editorial, the surgeons general accused Kennedy of leading a campaign to silence and sideline career public health researchers at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which they said had created "an atmosphere of fear and distrust" in public health agencies, in which "scientific findings are censored, evidence is disregarded, and career officials are pressured to rubber-stamp conclusions that are not backed by science."
The surgeons general aren't the only public health experts warning about the negative impact of Kennedy's tenure. NPR reported on Monday that two professional psychiatric associations, the Southern California Psychiatry Society and the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health, have now called for Kennedy's removal as HHS secretary.
In a statement released late last month, the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health charged that Kennedy "has undermined the public health infrastructure" by retaliating against scientists who have opposed his directives, while at the same time promoting "fringe ideas" that have "contributed to public confusion."
The committee ended its statement by calling on Trump to remove Kennedy from his post and "appoint a qualified, evidence-driven leader without delay."
Similarly, the Southern California Psychiatric Association has released a statement calling for Kennedy's ouster so that he can be replaced with a "qualified health leader with the training, experience, and integrity required to safeguard the health and well-being of all Americans."
Dr. Emily Wood, co-chair of the Southern California Psychiatric Association, told NPR that she was particularly disturbed by the recently released Make America Health Again (MAHA) report that she said "specifically misrepresents the data on psychotropic medications, really ignoring the full body of the scientific literature."
She said that this misrepresentation of data was used by the report to call "for various ways to limit access to psychiatric medications, which is extremely disturbing as these are medications that are critical for many individuals with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, ADHD, and many disorders."
Last month, more than 1,000 current and former HHS employees released a letter calling for Kennedy's removal, as they accused him of trying to "endanger the nation’s health" by "sowing public mistrust" of vaccines.
The surgeons general on Tuesday also suggested that Kennedy should no longer serve as the country's top health official, saying that "the nation deserves a health and human services secretary who is committed to scientific integrity and can restore morale and trust in our public health agencies."
"Having served at senior levels in government, we know that politics are complicated," they said. "But this is bigger than politics. It’s about putting the health of Americans first."
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Trump-GOP Hiding Federal Data So Nobody Will Know the Depth of the Destruction They Are Sowing
"Without sufficient funding and freedom from political interference, the federal statistical system as we know it—and our ability to make economic and policy decisions based in reality—are in jeopardy," said researchers.
Sep 29, 2025
In recent weeks, efforts by the Trump administration to conceal statistics and data from the public have made headlines—from the US Department of Justice's decision to delete a 2024 study that showed right-wing extremists are behind the vast majority of ideologically driven killings in the US, contrary to the White House's repeated claims about violence from the left, to President Donald Trump's firing of a top economist after an unfavorable jobs report that he said was released to hurt him politically.
In a new report Monday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) detailed how Trump's overt politicization of data has combined with funding cuts to make it harder for experts—and the public that's impacted by the Trump administration's agenda—to see how those very policies are impacting households across the country.
"Without sufficient funding and freedom from political interference, the federal statistical system as we know it—and our ability to make economic and policy decisions based in reality—are in jeopardy," said CBPP bsenior research analyst Victoria Hunter Gibney and vice president for housing and income security Cara Brumfield.
The report warns of "disappearing federal data"—both information that has been surreptitiously yanked from public view and data that the administration has announced will no longer be available, like the US Department of Agriculture annual Household Food Security reports.
As Common Dreams reported last week, the agency called the survey "redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous" and claimed they have "failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder," as it said it would stop publishing the data—the federal government's main source of information on hunger.
"Without data, it is also going to be hard not only to fact-check Trump and his cronies but to measure the (most likely horrific) impact of Trump’s policies."
The decision followed the Republican Party's passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which includes the biggest-ever cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at a time when more than 47 million Americans—including 1 in 5 children—are facing food insecurity.
In addition to preemptively rejecting research that would have shown the impact of the GOP's SNAP cuts, the administration has shown no interest in tracking weather disasters via its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which was discontinued in May; the effects of crime on LGBTQ+ Americans via National Crime Victimization Survey; and even the existence of LGBTQ+ communities via the National Health Interview Survey.
The administration has also stopped the federal government from collecting data by overseeing mass layoffs across the public servant workforce, with the Department of Health and Human Services placing researchers with the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System on administrative leave in April—ending the government's accounting of maternal mortality numbers. HHS also laid off the analysts who worked on federal poverty guidelines that are used to calculate eligibility for parts of Medicaid as well as nutrition and home energy assistance.
In a multitude of ways, the CBPP said, the administration is "suppressing data that would reveal the harmful effects of the Republican megabill’s deep cuts and leaving families’ struggles harder to track."
The report also warns that "brain drain" is worsening the US Census Bureau's ability to collect population data that helps determine communities' representation in Congress, federal funding allocation, and plan community services. Former Census Bureau Director Robert Santos left halfway through his five-year term shortly after Trump took office in January. Santos spearheaded efforts to make the survey more inclusive and emphasized rebuilding trust with immigrant and Latino communities after Trump, during his first term, pushed to include a citizenship question on the survey.
A top economist at the Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin, was also replaced this month by Trump appointee George Cook, who has "no prior government experience and no advanced training in statistical methods," the CBPP said.
The Republican Party is currently pushing to further weaken efforts to count the population of the US, with the House Appropriations Committee reporting out legislation this month to officially designate the decennial census as voluntary and drastically limit efforts to follow up with nonrespondents. Mandatory participation is not enforced, but the Census Bureau has found that response rates plummet when the survey is officially designated as voluntary.
The proposed change would "seriously exacerbate risks to data quality from nonresponse bias," said the CBPP.
The same bill reported out by the House committee proposed slashing $40 million from the Census Bureau budget, impacting the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which collects data on a number of economic well-being indicators and "enables policymakers to understand how proposed laws will change eligibility and costs."
The reduced version of SIPP that would be funded by the bill "is unlikely to provide the uniquely rich content (such as month-by-month income data) and structure (such as following children as they move between different caregivers’ homes) that allow the current SIPP to answer policymakers’ questions about families, their needs, and the programs that serve them," said the group.
The CBPP released its analysis as Liza Featherstone wrote at The New Republic that the president is "waging a catastrophic war on data" that is "fundamental to Trump and his authoritarian regime."
Trump's destructive cuts to agencies and surveys that collect crucial data have been paired with numerous baseless claims by the president and his allies—that Tylenol taken in pregnancy causes autism, that violence is surging in cities where he plans to deploy federal troops, and that transgender people disproportionately commit mass shootings and violence.
"It will be increasingly hard for correctives on such points to get traction, however, since Trump’s administration has greatly reduced its own ability to collect and disseminate accurate information about crime," wrote Featherstone.
"Without data, it is also going to be hard not only to fact-check Trump and his cronies but to measure the (most likely horrific) impact of Trump’s policies," she added. "That too is almost certainly intentional—or at least very convenient for him."
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House GOP Votes Down Amendments to Restore Funding for Meals on Wheels, AIDS Prevention
"They're happy to give even more to the wealthiest with giant tax breaks," said Rep. Mark Pocan, "but when it comes to helping people in need, there's never enough to go around."
Sep 10, 2025
House Republicans have struck down a pair of amendments to fully fund the Meals on Wheels program and AIDS prevention as part of this week's markup process for the fiscal year 2026 US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) budget.
The amendments were proposed by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) to the bill recently released by the House Appropriations Committee, which proposes to cut HHS funding by 6%.
Part of that funding comes from Meals on Wheels, the charity that provides an estimated 250 million meals each year to senior citizens unable to cook for themselves. The charity says that 9 in 10 of its providers receive some amount of federal funding and that for 60% of them, it represents more than half their operating budget.
According to Pocan, who spoke Monday on the House floor, the Republican bill underfunds the food assistance program by $600 million, which he says is likely to cost 1.9 million people their access to food.
"Republicans in the appropriations process are leaving seniors to starve," Pocan said.
Combined with the $187 billion already cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which Republicans passed in July, Pocan said it amounts to "the largest cut to food assistance in our nation's history."
Pocan juxtaposed these cuts with the "extravagant dinner" hosted this weekend at Trump's new, private White House "Rose Garden Club," which White House social media shows featured "steak and a fudge-filled seven-layer cake."
"I guess the theme of the White House event was 'let them eat cake,'" Pocan joked.
When he proposed the amendment as part of the markup process on Tuesday, Pocan spoke about his elderly mother's experience relying on the Meals on Wheels program when she dealt with mobility issues.
"I would hope that this is something where we could get together and say, 'Yeah, this should be a priority... We respect our seniors and we're going to show that through Meals on Wheels," Pocan said before his House colleagues.
Every single Republican on the Appropriations Committee voted against the amendment.
Republicans also unanimously struck down Pocan's amendment to restore nearly $2 billion for AIDS prevention cut from the House GOP bill, which makes up 25% of the total budget cuts to HHS.
In June, the Foundation for AIDS Research projected that Trump's proposal to cut $1.3 billion worth of HIV prevention funds "could cause an additional 144,000 new HIV diagnoses, 15,000 deaths, and 128,000 more people living with HIV in the US by 2030."
The Appropriations Committee budget goes even further than Trump's proposed budget released earlier this year, cutting over $1.7 billion worth of AIDS prevention funding.
It calls for the total elimination of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding to combat HIV and cuts $220 million allocated to Trump's own Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) initiative. It also eliminates $525 million from the Ryan White Program, which provides grants to over 400 HIV/AIDS clinics providing care and treatment.
"This is not a bill for making America healthy again, but a disastrous bill that will reignite HIV in the United States," said Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute. "Eliminating all HIV prevention means the end of state and local testing and surveillance programs, educational programs, and linkage to lifesaving care and treatment, along with PrEP. It will translate into an increased number of new HIV infections, which will be costlier to treat in the long run."
After Republicans voted down his amendment to reverse these "devastating" cuts, Pocan wrote on X, "They're happy to give even more to the wealthiest with giant tax breaks, but when it comes to helping people in need, there's never enough to go around."
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