Insiders have revealed the shocking levels of dysfunction that President Donald Trump and his Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have unleashed on the nation’s public health system.
More than 40 current and former employees with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described to The New York Times how Kennedy, a former anti-vaccine activist, has sidelined scientists, stacked his department with ideologues, and destroyed vital programs.
“I’m an E.R. doc, so I handle stress pretty well. But this was like being in a mass disaster nonstop for eight months,” said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s former chief medical officer, Debra Houry.
Houry said that when Trump first took office, he issued a series of executive orders requiring CDC officials to scrub the agency’s website of any language the administration disapproved of.
That meant they didn’t have the time to perform the agency’s core duties, such as implementing public health programs and helping states navigate outbreaks.
“Somebody from the H.H.S. communications team said, ‘Well, don’t you do this every four years, changing the priorities and things like that?’ I said, ‘Science doesn’t change based on who is in office,’” Houry told the Times.
The acting director of HHS issued a directive on January 22, 2025, requiring a presidential appointee or designee to review all public communications, including any phone call with anyone outside the agency.
An unnamed material HIV specialist told the Times that people stopped putting anything in writing because they were worried that DOGE was monitoring their chats and calls. They also began leaving their laptops in their garages over concerns that their computers were recording them.
In late January, Kennedy told the Senate during his confirmation hearing that he wanted “gold standard” science to set the nation’s health policy, claimed that he supported the measles and polio vaccines, and said he was open to changing his views on the CDC and HHS.
But after he was confirmed in February, the political appointees in charge of public communications eliminated the “stringent scientific process” used to vet information included on the CDC’s website, which previously had to be checked and double-checked, said Susan A. Wang, a former senior medical adviser in the global immunization division, according to the Times.
“For political appointees to take over the means of communication is devastating, and also dangerous,” Wang said. “Now, some things are correct and some are not, which means that you can’t trust any of it.”
The political appointees also began shutting down divisions or randomly trying to move them to a new Administration for a Healthy America, which didn’t actually exist, Houry said.
There was no director of the CDC, and whenever staff tried to ask questions, their managers and leaders failed to get any answers. Instead of receiving communications with email signatures and information about who to contact with questions, “a lot of it looked like spam,” or came from the Office of Personnel Management, according to Wang.
“It was like being in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and discovering that there is no man behind the curtain,” she said.
In the meantime, Kennedy was failing to contain actual health emergencies, including the worst measles outbreak in decades, said Demetre C. Daskalakis, the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
He was also busy revising the childhood vaccine schedule to contradict his own agency’s findings, Daskalakis told the Times.
A judge blocked the vaccine changes last week and ruled that Trump had illegally fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices and replaced them largely with anti-vaccine crusaders lacking relevant medical experience.
And yet, the full extent of the damage of Kennedy’s tenure won’t be revealed until after Trump is gone, said Abby Tighe, a former public health adviser working in overdose prevention, speaking to the Times.
Andrew Nixon, a department spokesman, told the Times in a statement, “Within a year, Secretary Kennedy restored the C.D.C. on its core mission of fighting infectious disease by eliminating mission creep and replacing leaders who resisted reform.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
