April 2025

Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has slashed vital health programs that the American people rely on. 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. Experts have made it clear these cuts will have devastating impacts across the country. In response, Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse issued the following statement: 

“Donald Trump is doing everything he can to sabotage American health care and rip away lifesaving benefits from millions of Americans. From halting life-saving research to limiting the ability of critical departments to do their jobs, the effects of these draconian cuts are already being felt across the country. As a result, more Americans will get sick and more will die.”

COMMENTARY

Dr. Robert Califf, Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner: “The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. I believe that history will see this a huge mistake.” [LinkedIn, 4/1/25]

Robert Califf: “If we let down our guard and don’t do a good job reviewing, we’re going to unleash some things that are really dangerous into the population. Unless there’s some super plan, there’s going to be an effect on safety, because it takes whole teams of people to monitor safety of products, and the timetables for product review will probably be delayed.” [CNN, 4/1/25] 

Peggy Hamburg, Former FDA Commissioner: “Obviously this is horrifying, thoughtless and very short-sighted. … These cuts/RIFS will be devastating to an agency that is regarded as the gold standard around the world.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Former CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen: “These cuts to agency experts and programs leave our country less safe, less prepared and without the necessary talent and resources to respond to health threats.” [CNN, 4/1/25] 

Don Berwick, Former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: “While funding levels have ebbed and flowed in the past, the Trump administration cuts [are] entirely unprecedented and vicious beyond any precedent. … We’re injuring the future severely. … This is taking down the research structure of America.” [The Boston Globe, 4/1/25]

Tom Frieden, Former Director of the CDC and President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives: “The CDC cuts announced Tuesday threaten America’s health, safety, and economy. Despite claims of efficiency, these cuts target proven programs that prevent disease and save lives — and as a result, Americans will be sicker and face increased health care costs. The government’s goal should not be to hit an arbitrary number of jobs eliminated, but to focus on the number of illnesses and premature deaths prevented.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Mitch Zeller, Former FDA Tobacco Chief: “If you make it virtually impossible to create and draft policy, then you are eviscerating the role of the center. … From a public health perspective it makes absolutely no sense.” [Associated Press, 4/1/25] 

Former Administration for Community Living Employee Matt Cutler: “I think people need to ask themselves, did the money that’s going to their communities arrive sooner and more accurately as a result of this? And if not, they need to start asking questions and holding people accountable.” [Roll Call, 4/1/25]

Alison Barkoff, Former Director for Administration on Community Living and Director of Health Law Program at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health: “The programs that ACL implements improve the lives of literally tens of millions of older adults, people with disabilities and their families and caregivers. … There’s no way to have these RIFs and not impact the programs and the people who rely on them.“ [NPR, 4/1/25] 

Sam Bagenstos, Former General Counsel of HHS and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan: “It’s really hard to comprehend the effect on so many people who have worked so hard to ensure public health and have suffered for it. … It’s just going to be absolutely terrible for public health.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Emily Erbelding, Director of the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases: “Everybody has been waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I just thought, ‘well, this is the shoe.’ […] It’s going to hurt science for a whole generation.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Andrew Germain, Director of Fiscal Operations and Accountability for the Administration for Children and Families: “For the communities that need the funding and need the support of the federal office, they’re going to be without those resources. … You’re talking about individuals who rely on crisis assistance from the LIHEAP program to keep the power on, whether it be for a medical reason or some other potentially life-threatening purpose.” [NBC News, 4/1/25] 

Walter Koroshetz, National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System Director: “To get rid of 11 of our senior PIs … we’re hoping that’s a mistake, because we can’t figure out why they would want to do that. … The labs affected by the layoffs include those involved in clinical trials as well as preclinical studies. It is unclear, NIH staff said, what the plans are for the data they’ve accumulated or what will happen to patients involved in ongoing trials.” [WIRED, 4/1/25]  

Dr. Michelle Tarver, Director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health: “Your work has been critical to advancing medical device innovation, ensuring patient safety, and upholding the public trust in what we do. … You will be deeply missed in the impact of your absence will be felt far and wide.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Alex Saint, Health Communications Specialist at the FDA: “People need to know the action that they need to take to keep themselves safe and healthy, and if you don’t have any way to communicate that to the public, people are on their own,” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Indian Health Service Employee: “I find it insulting. … The way it’s presented as an option to folks makes an IHS job seem even more undesirable.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

FDA Official: “The food compliance officers and animal drug reviewers survived, but they have no one at the comms office to put out a safety alert, no admin staff to pay external labs to test products.” [CBS News, 4/1/25] 

Former CDC Employee: “It’s so chaotic. The amount of knowledge that is being purged today at CDC is just tragic. … They are firing whole organizational units. These are people that have 30 years of service, people with children, veterans, there was no thought put into trying to retain people that have institutional knowledge. […] Most of the money at CDC does not fund staff, it funds money going out to states, cities, tribes, public health departments, community organizations. So when you’re shutting down the lead program, you’re shutting down funding that supports tracking whether lead is in the water or not. Programs that have been around for decades [are] just gone.” [Rolling Stone, 4/2/25] 

Former Reproductive Health Division Staffer: “You don’t expect your whole program to be wiped out. … Without CDC’s contraception guidelines, more women will die as pregnancy is the most dangerous thing a 20 or 30 year old will do in the U.S.” [Rolling Stone, 4/2/25] 

Former CDC Staffer: “Shitshow is an understatement for what just happened at the CDC. … What’s especially concerning is that the entire CDC FOIA office has been fired. Without a FOIA team now the American people have significantly less transparency into what the CDC is doing and puts the agency at significant legal risk for not complying with FOIA requests for information.” [Rolling Stone, 4/2/25]

Michael T. Osterholm, Director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy: “Today was simply a tragedy. … There is so much intellectual capital that literally got swept under the rug today in this country, and we are going to pay a price for this for years to come.” [The New York Times, 4/1/25] 

Wendy Armstrong, Director of Infectious Diseases at the University of Colorado: “We’ve had a lot of devastating days, but this really is unfathomable. … It’s astounding, it will affect patients with all kinds of different kinds of infections, and Americans will suffer, and people will die, and that’s a horrible thing to see coming.” [The Bulwark, 4/1/25] 

Jade Pagkas-Bather, Infectious Disease Doctor at the University of Chicago: “We’re going to have patients die…Unnecessary, preventable death. […] This is not just something that impacts people in the ivory tower. This is not just something that impacts people who are physicians, or scientists, or academics. This is coming for you.” [WIRED, 4/1/25] 

Joseph Cherabie, Physician & Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis: “It will be catastrophic. We’re still seeing young people coming in with new HIV diagnoses, sometimes advanced HIV. Our efforts are largely dependent on these federal grants. … We use them to make sure that we are able to distribute HIV testing equipment. We use them to make sure that we can get information and data on how much PrEP is being distributed, how many HIV diagnoses we have, how many HIV tests we’re giving out. If we lose that, then we’re moving around in the dark.” [WIRED, 4/1/25] 

Katy Kozhimannil, Health Policy Researcher at the University of Minnesota: “I am truly concerned about the potential impacts. With the loss of staff that support PRAMS, we risk a longer delay or loss of this important data resource for studying maternal health.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Marian Jarlenski, Professor of Health Policy at the University of Pittsburgh: “I don’t know how else to say it, this data system is needed. It’s not an option. It’s part of having a functional public health system.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Ezekiel Emanuel, Oncologist and Bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania: “It has fueled many of the breakthroughs from discovering the DNA code for each amino acid to the hepatitis C virus. … Dismantling it will not make America great but undercut our position as the world’s leader in science. Americans will suffer. … Diseases will not be cured and treatments will not be found.” [The Bulwark, 4/1/25] 

Dr. Duane Wesemann, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s: “We’ve been hit by a wave. … The impact is devastating.” [The Boston Globe, 4/1/25]

Dr. Bruce Fischl, Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School: “We are all terrified. … Every morning when I wake up, I check to see whether our grants have been affected.” [The Boston Globe, 4/1/25]

Ariel Beccia, Instructor at the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: “I was shocked and devastated,” said Ariel Beccia. “If this continues, we are going to lose a generation of scientists.” [The Boston Globe, 4/1/25]

Sharon Gilmartin, Executive Director of Safe States Alliance: “Our Indian Health Service is a really important part of our public health infrastructure, but it shouldn’t be used as a pawn when actually you should place people into the Indian Health Service that actually are meant to work with tribal nations and are confident to do so.” [STAT, 4/1/25] 

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Spokesperson Alex Schriver: “We recognize the need to find efficiencies, but it’s critical the FDA has the expertise and capacity it needs to maintain its gold standard regulatory review. … The rapid and substantial changes at FDA this week raise questions about the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission to bring new innovative medicines to patients.” [Politico, 4/1/25]

Last week, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. announced plans to dismantle critical health care services for the American people by gutting his own department. The latest plan includes 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 after thousands of employees have already left HHS due to DOGE efforts to slash the federal workforce to the bone and cut the programs the American people rely on. These drastic cuts will undermine disease prevention, food inspection, and drug safety, raising the danger Americans face. 

HEADLINES

CNN: ‘It’s a Bloodbath’: Massive Wave of Job Cuts Underway at US Health Agencies.

• “Cuts at the CDC slashed divisions that work on workplace health and safety, HIV, injury prevention, reproductive health, smoking and violence prevention, among others.”

Forbes: How The Layoff Of 10,000 Health Workers From HHS Could Affect Your Health. 

• “Employees at the CDC are tasked with responding to infectious disease threats like measles, implementing prevention programs for potential outbreaks like bird flu and communicating effective messages to the public so Americans can stay safe. With thousands fewer employees staffing the center, the ability to monitor and contain diseases effectively could be hindered… The Food and Drug Administration, which sets safety standards for medical devices, drugs and food, will see a reduction of 3,500 workers. This degree of downsizing may slow the approval process for many lifesaving drugs and delay inspection of food processing facilities… Institutions of higher learning are already potentially facing enormous funding cuts with a cap of indirect costs to federal research grants to 15%, which translates to hundreds of millions of dollars that will not be granted to many universities.”

STAT: At CDC, Trump Administration’s Job Cuts Wipe Out Wide Array of Specialists. 

• “In all, the CDC is expected to lose roughly 2,400 employees, or about 18% of its staff, as part of the broader cuts playing out across the Department of Health and Human Services… The Trump administration has argued the CDC’s mission had become too broad, and that it should focus squarely on infectious disease concerns… ‘We are weaker,’ said one CDC employee who did not receive a termination notice but asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. The individual noted that the CDC is the country’s rapid response force, deployed when there are new disease threats or bioterror attacks. ‘If there was an outbreak, I would not know who is deployment-ready to get on a plane in the next 24 hours,’ this person wrote. ‘I would not know who is still left to GET people deployment-ready if they are not already up-to-date.’”

The Washington Post: Widespread Layoffs, Purge of Leadership Underway at U.S. Health Agencies. 

• “Senior leaders across the Department of Health and Human Services were put on leave and countless other employees lost their jobs Tuesday as the Trump administration began a sweeping purge of the agencies that oversee government health programs… At the CDC, entire branches and divisions were eliminated or significantly reduced, employees said. In the Immunization Services Division, staff members who worked on vaccination education and outreach to under-vaccinated communities were among those who received notices, including one person working on the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico, according to two staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.” 

Bloomberg: Top US Drug, Tobacco Regulators Cut as RFK Jr. Reshapes Health Agency. 

• “The sweeping cuts also allow Kennedy to reshape the country’s health policy and communications, providing a road map for where the new health chief is directing his focus. Among the 10,000 people cut on Tuesday, some entire divisions were gutted including groups working on sexually transmitted diseases, environmental health, global health and birth defects, according to people familiar with the matter. Big swaths of the agency’s communications and federal records teams were also laid off.”

Newsweek: Here’s How RFK Jr.’s HHS Cuts Could Impact Americans. 

• “HHS administers health insurance programs that affect nearly half the U.S. population, including Medicare and Medicaid, and regulates medical products and food. Critics warn that the scale of the cuts could jeopardize disease response capacity, scientific research, and regulatory oversight. ‘They may as well be renaming it the Department of Disease because their plan is putting lives in serious jeopardy,’ Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, said on Friday.” 

NBC News: Widespread Job Cuts Begin at Health Agencies. 

• “The administration made deep and wide-ranging cuts to divisions responsible for tackling HIV, improving minority health and preventing injury, such as gun violence. Jobs were eliminated at offices overseeing the approval of new drugs, providing health insurance and responding to infectious disease outbreaks. A number of lesser-known divisions — including several focused on the safety of mining workers — were cut entirely.”

Politico: Thousands Laid off as Kennedy and Musk Take Aim at Health Agencies. 

• “Driving the cuts is Kennedy’s desire to reorient HHS to combat chronic diseases, rather than infectious ones, and root out conflicts of interest he claims have led it to approve dangerous drugs. A longtime critic of vaccination, Kennedy has accused HHS of downplaying vaccine side effects — in defiance of public health consensus that vaccines are safe.”

EXPERTS

Dr. Robert Califf, Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner: “The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. I believe that history will see this a huge mistake.” [LinkedIn, 04/01/25]

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Former Trump Food and Drug Administration Commissioner: “Through a generation of congressional actions, investments in expertise and hiring, and careful policymaking, we built the FDA into the most efficient, forward-leaning drug regulatory agency in the world—and established the U.S. as the global center of biopharmaceutical innovation. Today, the cumulative  barrage on that drug-discovery enterprise, threatens to swiftly bring back those frustrating delays for American consumers, particularly affecting rare diseases and areas of significant unmet medical need.” [X, 04/01/25]

Dr. Mandy Cohen, Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director: “These cuts to agency experts and programs leave our country less safe, less prepared and without the necessary talent and resources to respond to health threats.” [NBC, 04/01/25]

Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, Former Biden Administration COVID-19 Coordinator: “We’ve never seen anything like this before. We rely on our CDC for things like tracking down disease outbreaks. We rely on NIH for research into new treatments and tests and vaccines. At this moment, whether those will continue to be effective has really been put into question. We don’t know what the implications of all of this will be. I’m worried that what we’re going to see is more people getting sick, more disease outbreaks and infrastructure that is going to be less and less capable of responding to those threats.” [NPR, 04/01/25]

Jeremy Berg, Former Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH: “The level of cuts at NIH I am hearing about today is truly mind-boggling. I try not to be hyperbolic but this seems to be a massacre. … I honestly don’t know where this leads.” [NPR, 04/01/25]

Dr. Tom Frieden, Former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: “If we look at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are discussions of reducing our global work that’s really dangerous. It means that instead of finding and stopping threats where they emerge, which is less expensive, safer and more efficient, we’ll have to fight them here within the United States at greater risk and greater expense. … These are changes which not only will make the U.S. less safe, less healthy, and with higher healthcare costs, but unless these changes are reversed, they will literally cause millions of deaths around the world.” [PBS, 03/29/25]

Larry Levitt, KFF Executive Vice President for Health Policy: “The general public likely won’t feel the results of these HHS layoffs immediately. But eventually, these layoffs will affect the health information available to people, access to care and prevention, and oversight of health and social services.” [X, 04/01/25]

Dr. Craig Spencer: “Thousands of the best experts at FDA, NIH, and all across HHS are being terminated right now. These are the people who make sure the medications you and your children take are safe. These are the people who perform and oversee research on cancer, infant health, and so so so much more. These are the people who make sure new devices that physicians and patients use are effective. These are the people who keep workers safe on the job and help prevent devastating injuries for workers all around the country. These are the people who track what drugs and medications are experiencing shortages so we can adapt. These are the people who help tackle HIV and other infectious diseases, asthma, lead poisoning, and everything else that makes many Americans sick. And now, thousands of them are gone. There is no way this makes Americans healthier. We will regret this.” [X, 04/01/25]

Dr. Richard Besser, President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: “HHS has a mission to improve and protect Americans’ health and wellbeing. Its leadership should be working nonstop to ensure health is no longer a privilege but a right. Instead, they are systematically and cruelly dismantling our nation’s public health system and workforce, which threatens the health and wellbeing of everyone in America. … These are reckless, thoughtless cuts that will only make American communities less healthy and less safe. They represent an abdication of the department’s essential responsibility to promote and protect health.” [Press Release, 04/01/25]

Barbara Collura, President of RESOLVE: “It is vital that the CDC, our nation’s public health agency, employs doctors and scientists who understand infertility, a disease that impacts one in six people worldwide. Following today’s layoffs at the CDC, there will be no experts on infertility who will be able to inform public policy, brief members of Congress, publish articles and reports, and advance public awareness on the causes and treatments for infertility. RESOLVE is deeply concerned by this development and what it means for those who struggle to build their family.” [X, 04/01/25]

As Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) holds the Senate floor to defend Medicaid from Republican budget cuts amid Medicaid Awareness Month, new Navigator polling confirms Medicaid is “deeply” popular across the board and there is broad opposition across party lines to any cuts to Medicaid. Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are pursuing nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid so they can give billionaires another tax cut. If they get their way, millions could lose their health care. Poll after poll confirms this is completely out of step with the American people. Here’s the latest:

Medicaid is Widely Popular. While Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are trying to slash hundreds of billions from the country’s largest health insurance program, 77 percent of voters view Medicaid favorably, including 70 percent of Republicans. 

Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose Cuts to Medicaid. 75 percent of Americans are strongly or somewhat opposed to cuts to Medicaid. 59 percent of Americans, or nearly every three in five, strongly oppose any cuts. And 60 percent of voters, or three in five, know someone who relies on Medicaid for health care coverage, underscoring the fact that the consequences of Republican cuts to Medicaid would touch nearly every household in America.