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Trump’s War on Health Care: Public Health Watch

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May 12, 2025
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“It’s all cronyism going forward.” – HHS under RFK Jr’s rule

Welcome to Public Health Watch, a weekly roundup from Protect Our Care tracking catastrophic activity as part of Donald Trump’s sweeping war on health care. From installing anti-vaccine zealot RFK Jr. as Secretary of HHS to empowering Elon Musk to make indiscriminate cuts to our public health infrastructure, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, Donald Trump is endangering the lives of millions of Americans. Protect Our Care’s Public Health Watch will shine a spotlight on the worst of the Trump/RFK/Musk war on vaccines, science and public health and serve as a resource for the press, public and advocacy groups to hold them accountable. 

What’s Happening In Public Health?

Catastrophic Cuts Are Creating Chaos And Endangering Americans’ Health And Scientific Innovation

Stat: NIH grant terminations under Trump have totaled at least $1.8 billion, analysis finds It has been hard to quantify the scope of grants canceled by Trump administration health agencies, but in a paper published Thursday, researchers are putting forth one topline number: $1.8 billion in grants from the National Institutes of Health terminated in just over one month, including $544 million that had not yet been spent. The figure is imperfect and is likely an undercount, outside researchers noted, but points to an unprecedented disruption to science in the U.S.  The authors did not analyze grants by topic because there is no standardized way to do so. Instead they looked at the type of funding program the grants were a part of and the NIH institute or center awarding them. That analysis highlights the administration’s focus on grants it deems related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities saw the largest percent of its portfolio cut —  29.6% of the dollar amount of active grants — followed by 13.4% for the National Institute of Nursing Research, which awards many grants related to treating marginalized patients.  The study also found that 139 of 694 of the terminated grants were training grants, which support early-career researchers and are sometimes intended to promote diversity in the sciences.

CBS: National Institutes of Health lays off hundreds more staff, including at cancer research institute The National Institutes of Health has laid off hundreds more staff, multiple current and laid-off employees of the health agency told CBS News, including at its cancer research institute. Around 200 employees began receiving layoff notices Friday evening, said three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The move surprised NIH officials, since the department previously claimed no further cuts were planned at the agency.  “We thought the worst was behind us, and we were transitioning into this new phase, and the rug was just pulled out from underneath us,” one laid-off employee said.

CNN: Trump policies at odds with ‘Make America Healthy Again’ push At first glance, Trump appears to have fully embraced the MAHA movement championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. From proclaiming in his congressional speech a goal to “get toxins out of our environment” to launching a new commission to study cancer and other ailments, Trump has vowed to end what he calls an epidemic of chronic disease. But even as he extols MAHA, Trump has unleashed a slew of policies likely to make Americans less healthy. He’s slashing 20,000 full time positions from HHS and cutting more than $4 billion in indirect costs related to health research grants, including studies into treatment for Alzheimer’s and cancer. He also supported a GOP plan likely to kneecap Medicaid, a joint federal-state program that covers about 72 million Americans. The contradictions raise doubts about the sincerity of Trump’s support for the MAHA agenda and his administration’s commitment to making a dent in chronic disease — conditions that afflict about 133 million Americans and account for roughly 90% of the $4.5 trillion spent annually in the U.S. on health care.

Politico: RFK Jr., DOGE gutted legally required offices. Courts may undo it all. The Trump administration’s purge of the health department is cutting so deep that it has incapacitated congressionally mandated programs and triggered legal challenges. The administration insists the cuts are a lawful “streamlining” of a “bloated” agency, but federal workers, Democratic lawmakers, state officials and independent legal experts say keeping offices afloat in name only — with minimal or no staff — is an unconstitutional power grab. While agencies have some discretion over how to fulfill Congress’s demands, the upheaval inside the Department of Health and Human Services has claimed a host of programs the agency is required by Congress to maintain — cuts that are especially vulnerable to lawsuits and could upend Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s goal of slimming down a workforce he has repeatedly said is rife with waste, fraud and abuse.

Health Impacts:

Local Impacts: 

Public Resistance:

Chaotic Firings and Re-Hirings:

Cruel, Destructive, and Corrupt Policy Changes:

The FDA Is Being Dismantled – Stalling Drug Development And Leaving Us Vulnerable To Food-Borne Illness 

CBS: FDA’s top inspector abruptly retires The Food and Drug Administration’s top official overseeing drug and food safety inspections told staff on Monday he has decided to leave the agency, and multiple federal health officials told CBS News it comes amid frustration from inspectors with the FDA’s new commissioner. Michael Rogers had worked for the FDA for more than three decades, culminating in a role as the agency’s associate commissioner for inspections and investigations. Colleagues said they were surprised to learn that his final day in the office will be May 14.

Inside Health Policy: Makary Sets Low Expectations On COVID Booster Shots For Kids FDA Commissioner Marty Makary is sending signals that FDA will likely not authorize a COVID-19 booster vaccine this year for children, and perhaps not for the general population as a whole, saying he “cannot, in good faith” recommend booster vaccination for children.

Additional FDA News: 

RFK Jr. Is An Extreme MAGA Anti-Vaxxer Who’s Breaking His “Assurances” To Key Republicans To Get Confirmed And Mis-Managing HHS 

The Daily Beast: RFK Jr. Spews Wild Anti-Vax Theories As Measles Cases Surge As measles cases surge past quadruple digits for the first time in three decades, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been defending religious vaccine refusal and spreading pseudoscience on Fox News. “The MMR vaccine that we currently use has millions of particles that were created from aborted fetal tissue, millions of DNA fragments,” RFK Jr. told Fox News host Bret Baier in a report aired on Thursday. It’s a wildly misleading statement. The rubella component of the MMR vaccine is grown in a lab-cultured cell line originally derived from fetal tissue in the 1960s, but no actual tissue cells are present in the vaccine. Trace DNA fragments are non-functional and regulated to be safe.

Reuters: Exclusive: Kennedy aide and vaccine critic questions recent expert recommendations An aide to U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is seeking more information about three vaccines recommended by a panel of outside experts last month, according to documents reviewed by Reuters and two sources familiar with the situation. The advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had made recommendations regarding the use of separate shots approved to help protect against RSV, meningitis and chikungunya. The CDC is not required to adopt their recommendations, but when it does, they become guidelines for medical practitioners to follow. Dr. William “Reyn” Archer III joined the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees CDC, as a counselor in the secretary’s office after Kennedy took over in February, HHS records show. A critic of vaccines on social media for the past several years, Archer served as Texas state health commissioner in the late 1990s. Archer’s hiring and activity at HHS have not previously been reported. His role reviewing the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations is the latest indication of how Kennedy, who has spent decades raising doubts about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, is reshaping U.S. policy.

New York Times: Scientists Hail This Medical Breakthrough. A Political Storm Could Cripple It. To scientists who study it, mRNA is a miracle molecule. The vaccines that harnessed it against Covid saved an estimated 20 million lives, a rapid development that was recognized with a Nobel Prize. Clinical trials show mRNA-based vaccines increasing survival in patients with pancreatic and other deadly cancers. Biotechnology companies are investing in the promise of mRNA therapies to treat and even cure a host of genetic and chronic diseases, including Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. But to some state legislators, mRNA therapies are “weapons of mass destruction” and a public health threat. They argue that these vaccines are untested and unsafe, and will be pumped into the food supply to “mass medicate” Americans against their will. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has falsely called the mRNA shots against Covid “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Short for messenger RNA, mRNA exists naturally in every cell of every living organism — its discovery in 1961 was also celebrated with a Nobel Prize. But its association with Covid has thrust it to the center of a political storm, buffeted by vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, anger over lockdowns and mandates, and the ascendance of the Make America Healthy Again movement in the Trump administration. States and federal health agencies are playing on public wariness about vaccines to cancel research into mRNA more broadly, indicating how much the lingering politicization of Covid is fueling the new attacks on science.

Other MAHA Activities:

RFK’s Autism Plans Draw Widespread Condemnation And Calls For His Resignation 

CNN: HHS to build Medicare, Medicaid database on autism, other chronic illnesses The US Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday unveiled a pilot program for the National Institutes of Health to tap into Medicare and Medicaid data in its search for the root causes of autism. The database — which HHS said will draw from insurance claims, medical records and data from wearable technology such as smartwatches — is one of the first steps in HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid to find the causes of autism “by September.” Early signals from health officials that they would build a database to track autism were met with swift rebuke from advocacy organizations and doctors.

Stat: RFK Jr. wants Americans’ health records to study autism. It’s not that easy to get them As health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prepares to investigate vaccine complication rates, chronic diseases, and autism, real patients’ health records have emerged as a coveted resource.  Food and Drug Administration commissioner Marty Makary said in an interview with Megyn Kelly that “massive electronic health record data” could be used to monitor for vaccine injury. National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya announced the research agency would build a “transformative real-world data initiative” pulling in many streams of data, including private EHRs, to study autism and chronic disease. On Wednesday, the NIH said it would start that work by linking claims data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  This isn’t a new idea: Real-world data researchers and health data companies have been building similar platforms for years, often focusing on a single disease at a time. The NIH’s recent history is littered with efforts to build banks of health records and link them with other data in an effort to supercharge medical research.  But all those projects have been dogged by the same questions: Who owns the data? Who will profit from it? How do you keep it safe? And how do you get records from many organizations — with their own, often-inscrutable reporting differences — to play nice so researchers can trust their collective findings?

The Guardian: ‘A slippery slope to eugenics’: advocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism database Autism researchers and advocates are pushing back against the creation of an autism database – meant to track the health of autistic people in a major research study – and pointing to the ways such databases could be misused. While the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) denies it’s a registry, the agency did confirm a sweeping database of autistic people will power a $50m study on autism. The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, said last week that he plans to announce results from the study within months. A petition against the registry gained thousands of signatures in a single day, jumping from 2,500 to nearly 35,000 signatures within 24 hours. “I’m a quiet person who likes to just be in the background,” said first-time petition creator Ryan Smith, a parent of two neurodiverse children living in Idaho. He also didn’t want to make himself a target. “But I feel really, really, really strongly about this, and I have to speak up for my kids who can’t speak for themselves.”

More fallout from RFK Jr.’s autism plans:

Disastrous, Dangerous Appointments

Associated Press: Donald Trump taps wellness influencer close to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for surgeon general President Donald Trump is tapping Dr. Casey Means, a physician-turned-wellness influencer with close ties to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as his nominee for surgeon general after withdrawing his initial pick for the influential health post. Trump said in a social media post Wednesday that Means has “impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials” – referring to the “ Make America Healthy Again ” slogan – and that she will work to eradicate chronic disease and improve the health and well-being of Americans. “Her academic achievements, together with her life’s work, are absolutely outstanding,” Trump said. “Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History.” In doing so, Trump withdrew former Fox News medical contributor Janette Nesheiwat from consideration for the job, marking at least the second health-related pick from Trump to be pulled from Senate consideration. Nesheiwat had been scheduled to appear before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Thursday for her confirmation hearing.

Los Angeles Times: Trump’s pick for surgeon general quit medical residency due to stress, former department chair says President Trump’s choice of Dr. Casey Means, a Los Angeles holistic medicine doctor and wellness influencer, as his nominee for surgeon general appears to mark another attempt to defy establishment medicine and longstanding federal policy. Trump portrayed Means — a 37-year-old Stanford medical school graduate and author who describes herself on LinkedIn as a “former surgeon turned metabolic health evangelist” — in his announcement as fully in sync with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mission to “Make America Healthy Again.” “Casey has impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials, and will work closely with our wonderful Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to ensure a successful implementation of our Agenda in order to reverse the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and ensure Great Health, in the future, for ALL Americans,” Trump said in a statement on Truth Social. Some have raised questions about Means’ credentials. Although she graduated from medical school, she is not an active doctor licensed to practice medicine.

Axios: RFK Jr. picks controversial doctor as top vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist known for at times scathing social media critiques of public health policy, will be the Food and Drug Administration’s new top vaccine regulator, according to an email viewed by Axios. Why it matters: The University of California San Francisco physician will succeed Peter Marks, who abruptly resigned as director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in March, citing disagreements with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Driving the news: Prasad is an outspoken skeptic about COVID-19 vaccine mandates for kids, though he’s called the vaccine itself a “a miraculous, life-saving advance.” FDA commissioner Marty Makary wrote in an email to FDA staff that Prasad had published more than 500 academic articles, done extensive research in the field of oncology and presented at hundreds of scientific and medical conferences. “He brings a great set of skills, energy, and competence to the FDA and I know that he is eager to begin immersing himself in the important work of CBER and the agency as a whole.”

More on Trump’s terrible appointment choices: 

GOP State Policymakers Are Following RFK Jr.’s Lead Attacking Vaccines And Proven Public Health Measures

Politico: States loosen vaccine rules — even as measles outbreak rages he U.S. is on track to surpass 1,000 measles cases this year as the viral illness — once so rare that most young doctors don’t recognize the telltale rash — makes an alarming comeback. The outbreak, which has spread to 29 states as of May 1 and claimed three lives, hasn’t stopped some local lawmakers from considering or implementing policies that could make it even easier for parents to opt out of school vaccination requirements for their children.

NPR: Meet the Florida group chipping away at public benefits one state at a time As an Arizona bill to block people from using government aid to buy soda headed to the governor’s desk in April, the nation’s top health official joined Arizona lawmakers in the state Capitol to celebrate its passage. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said to applause that the legislation was just the start and that he wanted to prevent federal funding from paying for other unhealthy foods. “We’re not going to do that overnight,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to do that in the next four years.” Those words of caution proved prescient when Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed the bill a week later. Nevertheless, state legislation to restrict what low-income people can buy using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits is gaining momentum, boosted by Kennedy’s touting it as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” platform. At least 14 states have considered bills this year with similar SNAP restrictions on specific unhealthy foods such as candy, with Idaho and Utah passing such legislation as of mid-April. Healthy food itself isn’t largely a partisan issue, and those who study nutrition tend to agree that reducing the amount of sugary food people eat is a good idea to avoid health consequences such as heart disease. But the question over the government’s role in deciding who can buy what has become political. The organization largely behind SNAP restriction legislation is the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative policy think tank in Florida, and its affiliated lobbying arm, which has used the name Opportunity Solutions Project. FGA has worked for more than a decade to reshape the nation’s public assistance programs. That includes SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, which federal data shows helps an average of 42 million people afford food each month. It also advocates for ways to cut Medicaid, the federal-state program that connects 71 million people to subsidized health care, including efforts in Idaho and Montana this year.

Public Health Threats

Politico: Measles hits 1,000 cases — for the second time in 30 years The measles outbreak has surpassed 1,000 cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed Friday, a grim milestone that has only been achieved twice in the last 30 years. Three people have died in the outbreak, according to the CDC, including two school-aged children in Texas. Children under 5 account for roughly one-third of the 1,001 cases, the majority of which have been recorded in Texas. Nearly all patients — 96 percent — were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.

Stat: RSV sent fewer babies to the hospital last winter, after new treatment and vaccine arrived A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows there was a substantial drop in hospitalizations for respiratory syncytial virus this winter among very young children, who are at the highest risk of becoming severely ill if they contract RSV. This past winter was the first during which new options for protecting babies from the virus became widely available in the United States, though the products were first introduced in a limited way in advance of the 2023-2024 season.  The study, published in the CDC’s online journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, cannot prove that the new tools are the reason for the drop in hospitalizations among children under 7 months old, the age group targeted for these interventions. But a rise in hospitalizations among slightly older children — still at risk but too old to be eligible for the products — shows the decline occurred in the context of a severe RSV season. RSV is the No. 1 cause of hospitalizations of infants, with seriously ill babies struggling to breathe.

New York Times: Flu Killed 25 Children in New York This Season, the Most in Many Years Amid dropping vaccination rates, 25 children in New York State died from influenza during the 2024-25 flu season — more than in any recent flu season, state health authorities said on Wednesday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that more than 47 million people nationwide caught the flu between fall and spring and that more than 600,000 have been hospitalized. The hospitalization rate for flu is the highest it has been in 15 years. A number of factors have probably contributed to influenza’s heavy toll. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, more people have chosen not to be vaccinated against the seasonal flu. And some researchers believe that the mix of strains circulating this year tend to be associated with more intense flu seasons.

Public Health Threats Around The World:

Opinion and Commentary

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