Experts, advocates and former officials continue to sound the alarm as the Trump administration slashes vital public health officials and communicators from their positions within HHS. The latest announcement included firing 10,000 employees who have been responding to infectious disease outbreaks, approving new life-saving drugs, administering critical programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and more. This comes at a time when America is facing its largest measles outbreak in decades, in addition to other public health threats. As one epidemiologist put it: “this is the darkest day that I’ve had in 50 years of public health.” In response, Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse issued the following statement:
“These cuts at HHS threaten the health and safety of every American. This is all part of the devastating war on health care the Republicans have been carrying out for years. From halting life-saving research to scrapping the departments that keep us all safe, RFK Jr., Musk, and Trump get exactly what they want while Americans will suffer, get sick, and die.”
COMMENTARY
Marisa Kabas, independent journalist: “As news of Reductions in Force (RIFs) rapidly rolled in Tuesday, it was apparent that after the initial dust settled, it would be impossible to clearly see just how thorough the Trump administration’s gutting had been without having requisite information. This wasn’t just trimming the fat—they were killing the whole animal and stripping it for parts.” [The Handbasket, 4/2/25]
Dr. Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute: “It’s like a Fauci fixation. So many of these people are just dedicated, they really want to do good and now they’re losing their jobs senselessly.” [Politico, 4/2/25]
Peter Staley, HIV/AIDS activist: “It seems especially targeted against HIV, and also vaccines again. [Kennedy’s] anti-vax views, his AIDS denialism, his fingerprints are all over this. And I weep for our nation’s ability to fight infectious diseases.” [Politico, 4/2/25]
Adriane Fugh-Berman, Professor of Pharmacology at Georgetown University Medical Center: “Drug companies must love the defanging of the F.D.A. The Trump administration is destroying an agency crucial to public health.” [The New York Times, 4/3/25]
Michael Osterholm, an Epidemiologist and Director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy: “This is the darkest day that I’ve had in 50 years of public health. [It’s] almost a way of punishing them for what they have done. I can’t find anything in that effort that makes us better prepared.” [Politico, 4/2/25]
Gillian SteelFisher, Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: “[The layoffs are] a profound loss for public health, and for the public’s health.” “Good public health is a partnership with the public. It’s about helping people make decisions and take actions that protect them and their loved ones, and to do that, fundamentally, you have to be able to talk to people.” [The New York Times, 4/2/25]
Chanapa Tantibanchachai, Former F.D.A. Spokeswoman: “It’s doing a disservice to the public. It’s not in service of ‘radical transparency’ like Secretary Kennedy says. It’s the complete opposite.” [The New York Times, 4/2/25]
Dustin Hays, Former Chief of Science Communications at the National Eye Institute: “I think this is an egregious misstep by the government, and I don’t think they’re even realizing how long it takes to build an enterprise like N.I.H.” [The New York Times, 4/2/25]
Katherine Eban, Special Correspondent at Vanity Fair: “The slashing was so wide and deep that it can be hard to get a handle on just how much public health expertise was lost yesterday. The affected offices at the FDA may not be household names, but they perform critical work that protects every American and helps shape the regulatory decisions of manufacturers and foreign health agencies around the world, which rely on the FDA’s expertise.” [Vanity Fair, 4/2/25]
Peter Marks, Former FDA Vaccine Official: “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” [Vanity Fair, 4/2/25]
Anonymous FDA Employee: “The people making these decisions, they are clueless about what the FDA does.” [Vanity Fair, 4/2/25]
Robert Otto Valdez, Former Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ): “The cuts were largely in areas that are, quite honestly, catastrophic for the American health care system. My heart is very heavy with what this means for the American public, for the health of our neighbors, our children, our grandchildren, our parents.” [STAT, 4/2/25]
Robert Otto Valdez, Former Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ): “The lack of transparency is extraordinary and that raises many, many concerns because lots of damage can be done behind closed doors when the public and the press can’t see what’s going on. That’s exactly what authoritarian regimes do.” [STAT, 4/2/25]
Anonymous Former Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Grant Reviewer: “In a broader sense, if we lose this work, we’re losing, as a country, the ability to be able to effectively say that our health care system is safe, that it is top quality, that it is affordable.” [STAT, 4/2/25]
Anonymous Former ASPE Employee: “The people who decided on this kind of reorganization — they either don’t know what ASPE does, or they do know and this is very intentional. They don’t want researchers with this much independence answering questions and poking around with data. They want, I’m guessing, an organization that’s going to be more willing to fall in line with the priorities of HHS and the administration.” [STAT, 4/2/25]
Former Member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance Team: “It’s surprising to me. President Trump said he was the fertility president. How does cutting this program support that?” [NBC News, 4/2/25]
Micah Hill, President of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology: “The depth of expertise held by CDC personnel will be difficult to replace. In many ways, the American public health system has been the global leader, and we are now in danger of throwing that away and doing so in a manner that may be very difficult to recover from.” [NBC News, 4/2/25]
Senior Official, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ): “To gut a 300-member, $500 million agency for no other reason than to placate a need to see blood seems really shortsighted.” [KFF, 4/3/25]
Hardeep Singh at Baylor College of Medicine: “We need safety research to protect our patients from harms in health care. No organization in the world does more for that than AHRQ.” [KFF, 4/3/25]
Stephen Parente, Finance Professor at the University of Minnesota: “[W]e’re going to lose a culture of research that is measured, thoughtful, and provides a channel for young investigators to make their marks.” [KFF, 4/3/25]
Mitch Zeller, Former Director of the FDA’s Tobacco Center: “Regardless of one’s views on the performance of the center, I think anybody should be concerned that this is going to make what was already a challenging job for the center much more difficult. This is destroying prevention efforts when it comes to the leading cause of preventable disease and death. […] There now is no expertise left at the center to do forward-looking policy, whether it takes the form of regulations or guidance documents.” [STAT, 4/3/25]
Yolanda C. Richardson, Head of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids: “It is inexplicable and especially harmful that these cuts are coming at a time when the FDA should be redoubling its enforcement efforts against the many illegal, flavored e-cigarette products that have flooded our country from overseas and put kids at risk.” [STAT, 4/3/25]
Kathleen Sebelius, Former HHS Secretary: “HHS deals with Americans from birth to death. There is absolutely no way you can lose 25% of the workforce without directly affecting Americans across this country…[This includes] research and science at NIH, which is the gold standard of the world.” [CBS News, 4/2/25]
Anjee Davis, CEO of Fight Colorectal Cancer: “We’re scared that these blanket mandates could erase decades of progress fighting cancer. This isn’t about politics. It’s about protecting the progress we’ve fought so hard to achieve in cancer care and research over the past two decades.” [CBS News, 4/2/25]
Dr. Kimryn Rathmell, Former Director of the National Cancer Institute: “Discoveries are going to be delayed, if they ever happen.” [CBS News, 4/2/25]
Dr. Céline Gounder, Editor-at-Large at KFF Health News: “We’ve already seen China and European countries trying to recruit our scientists, because scientists here are concerned about their job opportunities. I just heard of a few from Yale who just left for Toronto…You have students who are worried about going into research, because they don’t know that there will be jobs. […] [These cuts are] very concerning, both in terms of the immediate impacts on health care, public health, and the longer term impacts on whether we will maintain our leadership in the health space.” [CBS News, 4/2/25]
Michael Totoraitis, Milwaukee Health Commissioner: “[Lead contamination] is just another example of how quickly federal policy can affect local on the ground work. I think, for a lot of our city residents who are following the lead crisis here in our schools, when we continue to update everybody, this is yet another complication to the work that we’re doing.” [CNN, 4/3/25]
Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials: “If you’re cutting off one leg off a three-legged stool at its knees, the stool is going to fall over. It’s going to cripple and fall down. And I’m worried about our governmental public health system overall, when we are losing positions in key health agencies that support really crucial functions all day, every day, to keep people safe and healthy in counties and cities across this country.” [CNN, 4/3/25]
CDC Employee, Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch: “We no longer have lead experts…So we won’t be able to provide that service at this time.” [CNN, 4/3/25]
Ernest Hopkins, Senior Strategist & Adviser for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation: “San Francisco and the region generally are about to be hit pretty seriously by the process that the HHS reorganization has unleashed…In a place like San Francisco that has been on the cutting edge, to have this kind of disruption — where the federal government, your partner, abruptly steps away — it completely puts everything at risk. San Francisco has done a very good job over the years of backfilling cuts at the federal level for HIV programs. But we’ve never experienced anything of this magnitude.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 4/2/25]
Carl Schmid, Founder of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute: “HIV has been a disease of disparities. And so you’ve got to prevent where the virus is, and you’ve got to treat the people who have it, no matter who they are.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 4/2/25]
Chuan Teng, Chief Executive of PRC (Formerly Known As the Positive Resource Center): “It’s a little bit difficult to draw the clear connection of what is being cut and how it will impact services, because it’s all happening real time right now. Part of the challenge is just the chaos. I don’t know if that’s by design but it feels like it. Just the level of uncertainty alone is causing a lot of issues.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 4/2/25]
Jorge Reyes Salinas, Equality California: “The progress that we’ve made is still very fragile, and these cuts really put at serious risk these efforts. In cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, agencies are already working with very limited resources and any reduction in funding could mean catastrophe. […] The path to ending the HIV epidemic isn’t automatic. It’s been a long process that we’ve been fighting for years. We’re talking about dismantling all of these efforts quickly and reducing decades of hard-won gains.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 4/2/25]
Dr. Philip Huang, Director & Health Authority for the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department: “I just had to tell our commissioners this morning that we’ve had to cancel over 50 different clinics in our community. […] That’s very short-sighted and not understanding of the way public health works. Being prepared for Covid helps build our capacity to be able to respond to other issues.” [NBC News, 4/1/25]
Dr. David Kessler, Former FDA Commissioner and White House Adviser on Pandemic Response under President Biden: “I think it’s [the latest round of layoffs] devastating, haphazard, thoughtless and chaotic. I think they need to be rescinded.” [The New York Times, 4/3/25]