NEW YORK U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s motto is Make America Healthy Again, but government cuts could make it harder to know if thats happening.
More than a dozen data-gathering programs that track deaths and disease appear to have been eliminated in the tornado of layoffs and proposed budget cuts rolled out in the Trump administrations first 100 days.
The Associated Press examined draft and final budget proposals and spoke to more than a dozen current and former federal employees to determine the scope of the cuts to programs tracking basic facts about Americans health. Among those terminated at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were experts tracking abortions, pregnancies, job-related injuries, lead poisonings, sexual violence and youth smoking, the AP found.
If you dont have staff, the program is gone, said Patrick Breysse, who used to oversee the CDCs environmental health programs.
Federal officials have not given a public accounting of specific surveillance programs that are being eliminated.
Instead, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman pointed the AP to a Trump administration budget proposal released Friday. It lacked specifics, but proposes to cut the CDCs core budget by more than half and vows to focus CDC surveillance only on emerging and infectious diseases.
Kennedy has said some of the CDCs other work will be moved to a yet-to-be-created agency, the Administration for a Healthy America. He also has said that the cuts are designed to get rid of waste at a department that has seen its budget grow in recent years.
Unfortunately, this extra spending and staff has not improved our nations health as a country, Kennedy wrote last month in The New York Post. Instead, it has only created more waste, administrative bloat and duplication.
Yet some health experts say the eliminated programs are not duplicative, and erasing them will leave Americans in the dark.
If the U.S. is interested in making itself healthier again, how is it going to know, if it cancels the programs that helps us understand these diseases? said Graham Mooney, a Johns Hopkins University public health historian.
The core of the nations health surveillance is done by the CDCs National Center for Health Statistics. Relying on birth and death certificates, it generates information on birth rates, death trends and life expectancy. It also operates longstanding health surveys that provide basic data on obesity, asthma and other health issues.
The center has been barely touched in layoffs, and seems intact under current budget plans.
But many other efforts were targeted by the cuts, the AP found. Some examples:
The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, which surveys women across the country, lost its entire staff about 20 people.
Its the most comprehensive collection of data on the health behaviors and outcomes before, during and after childbirth.
Researchers have been using its data to investigate the nations maternal mortality problem. Recent layoffs also wiped out the staffs collecting data on in vitro fertilizations and abortions.
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