By KIM BELLARD
Perhaps you are the kind of person who acts as though that the food in the grocery store somehow magically appears, with no supply chain vulnerabilities along the way. You trust that the water that you drink and the air you breathe are just fine, with no worries about what might have gotten into them before getting to you. You figure that the odds of a tornado or a hurricane hitting your location are low, so there’s no need for any early warning systems. You believe that you are healthy and don’t have to worry about any pesky outbreaks or outright epidemics.
Well, I worry about all those, and more. Say what you will about the federal government – and there’s plenty of things it doesn’t do well – it has, historically, served as the monitoring and warning system for these and other potential calamities. Now, under DOGE and the Trump Administration, many of those have been gutted or at least are at risk.
But, at the end of the day, the thing at risk is us.
Here is a not exhaustive list of examples:
FDA: Although HHS Secretary Kennedy has vowed he will keep the thousands of inspectors who oversee food and drug safety, it has already suspended a quality control program for its food testing laboratories, and has cut support staff that, among other things, make arrangements for those inspectors to, you know, go inspect. Even before recent cuts, a 2024 GAO report warned that the FDA was already critically short on inspectors.
The FDA has already laid off key personnel responsible for tracking bird flu, including virtually all of the leadership team in the Center for Veterinary Medicine’s office of the director. Plus: “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,” one FDA official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CBS News.
Even worse, drafts of the Trump budget proposal would further slash FDA budget, in part by moving “routine” food inspections to states.
CDC: Oh, gosh, where to start? Cuts have shut down the labs that help track things like outbreaks of hepatis and antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. We’re having a hard time tracking the current measles outbreak that started in Texas and has now spread to over half the states.
The White House wants to encourage more people to have babies, but has cut back on a national surveillance program that collects detailed information about maternal behaviors and experiences to help states improve outcomes for mothers and babies. It helped, among other things, compare IVF clinics. “We’ve been tracking this information for 38 years, and it’s improved mothers’ health and understanding of mothers’ experiences,” one of the statisticians let go told The Washington Post.
The Office on Smoking and Health was effectively shuttered, in what one expert called “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.” CDC cuts will force the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop collecting data on injuries that result from motor vehicle crashes, alcohol, adverse drug effects, aircraft incidents and work-related injuries.
And if you’re thinking of taking a cruise, you should know that the CDC’s cruise ship inspections have all been laid off – even though those positions are paid for by the cruise ship companies, not the federal government.
EPA: Even though EPA head Lee Zeldin “absolutely” guarantees Trump cuts won’t hurt either people or the environment, the EPA has already announced it will stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions, is shutting down all environmental justice offices and is ending related initiatives, “a move that will impact how waste and recycling industries measure and track their environmental impact on neighboring communities.”
The EPA has proposed rolling back 31 key regulations, including ones that limit limiting harmful air pollution from cars and power plants; restrictions on the emission of mercury, a neurotoxin; and clean water protections for rivers and streams. Mr. Zeldin called it the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” and declared it a “dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” But, sure, it won’t hurt anything.
The EPA is also proposing to loosen rules about coal ash storage and disposal. Most of us don’t know much about coal ash but Environmental Health News warns: “Coal ash is one of the largest industrial waste streams in the United States, containing toxic elements such as arsenic, mercury, and lead.” Meanwhile, sister agency NIOSH has laid off two-thirds of the staff who do black lung screening for coal miners, despite President Trump’s purported love of coal miners.
NIH: what’s happening to the NIH deserves and article on its own, some of which I’ve covered before. The Trump Administration has frozen much research in its track, laid off a generation of young scientists, is severely cutting the amount of overhead funding that research universities have come to rely on, and is now using NIH grants for political extortion (take that, Columbia ad Harvard!).
Its proposed budget would cut NIH’s budget nearly in half and consolidate its 27 agencies into eight. “This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science.
I could go on with other agencies, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that cuts at the National Weather Service and NOAA will mean “degraded operations” that, mark my words, will come back to haunt us.
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ProPublica calls the Administration’s efforts as a “war on measurement”:
In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.
It goes on to assert: “Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy.”
The efforts are also a war on science. Climate change deniers and vaccine deniers are examples of how we’ve entrusted our lives and health to people who reject well-established science in favor of their own personal beliefs, especially when that will make more money for big donors.
This is a crisis. This is a catastrophe. This is our future, and we won’t know some of it is happening until it is far too late to do anything about it.
Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor
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