Washington, D.C. – In recognition of National Public Health Week, Protect Our Care looks back at Donald Trump’s most reckless and dangerous actions so far this term that have seriously compromised public health and needlessly endangered Americans, especially children and people of color.
“Donald Trump’s contempt for science has had predictably harmful consequences. Preventable diseases like measles are surging while research and innovation against deadly illnesses have been defunded and trashed. Americans are getting sicker while Trump’s industry megadonors are getting richer from actions like protecting chemical companies that pollute our food with weedkiller,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project.
1) Picked Anti-Science, Ant-Vax Charlatan RFK Jr. To Run His Health Department. Trump has expressed nothing but approval and encouragement for his conspiracy-driven, science-denying Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he has dismantled public health infrastructure, purged experts, stacked key posts and advisory bodies with anti-vax quacks, slashed critical research, cancelled life-saving clinical trials, ignored outbreaks of measles among the unvaccinated, sabotaged basic public tools like vaccines.gov, created mass chaos inside agencies like HHS, the CDC, and the FDA, and caused confusion for families, clinicians, and states. These cuts to vital health programs and attacks on vaccines have disproportionately undermined the health of people of color.
2) Blessed The Dangerous CDC Child Vaccine Schedule Downgrade. In January, Trump approved the major downgrade of long-established and well-supported CDC child vaccine schedule, slashing recommended vaccines for American children from 17 down to 11, eliminating guidance for life-saving shots including against influenza, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A and B. The hugely unpopular and dangerous policy shift ignited revolt from 30 states including DC that have since “announced that they are no longer going to follow CDC’s recommendations for some or all childhood vaccines.” While a federal court stayed the reckless and likely “illegal” action in March, Trump’s henchmen are threatening to appeal the ruling and needlessly put kids back at risk of preventable disease. But serious long-term damage has already been done by fanning a further downward trend of vaccination rates.
3) Made Cancer-Linked Weedkiller Great Again. In February, Trump betrayed the MAHA movement that helped elect him by signing an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to bring back production of glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide that has been repeatedly linked to cancer – a gift to Republican chemical company megadonors at huge expense of public health.
4) Gutted Science and Innovation Through Canceled Grants, Shortchanged Budgets. A New York Times analysis of NIH awards found that in just the first six months of Trump’s second term, the agency terminated 1,389 medical research grants and delayed funding for more than 1,000 additional projects, disbursing about $1.6 billion less than the prior year over a comparable period. In the end, roughly over 2,000 NIH grants were canceled or frozen in 2025, touching every area of science and medicine, with only about half later reinstated, often after legal or political pressure. At the National Science Foundation, more than 400 active awards were terminated, and over 1,600 grants in total were cut, leaving overall science funding at its lowest level in decades and hitting health‑adjacent areas like climate and environmental health especially hard. The results have been devastating, disrupting labs, upending lives, delaying discoveries of new treatments, and gutting the pipeline of young scientists that have made U.S. science preeminent for more than 50 years. And now, Trump’s proposed FT27 budget seeks to make matters so much worse with an overall $15.4 billion cut to HHS, including a $5 Billion Cut (~10%) to the National Institutes of Health, jeopardizing thousands more research grants aimed at finding treatments and cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious diseases and many other illnesses.
5) Refusal to Pick Permanent CDC Head. Despite historic outbreaks of measles and other highly contagious diseases, Trump blew off a generous 210-day deadline to nominate a new CDC Director, leaving NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya to continue simultaneously running the NIH and CDC very poorly, just without the title of acting CDC director. A void of competent, committed leadership at the CDC gives the public no confidence that the agency is prepared to deal with looming public health threats.
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