It is critical we all stay clearheaded and informed on how federal decision-making will impact the health of all of us. Doing so keeps us nimble and better enables us to speak to our communities and friends on what’s happening and its everyday-person significance.
Today, we will focus on the real-world impacts of the massive cuts to the workforce of our nation’s Department of Health and Human Services. This entity oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, among other agencies. As educators, nurses and other frontline professionals, we must recognize that decisions today will have both immediate and generational impact. Being clear-eyed on these cuts will help us all be better, more informed and unified advocates for what is ultimately the best path forward for our country.
So, what are the top issues at stake?
1. Medical Research at Risk
New treatments for difficult-to-treat conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and even serious bacterial infections will become less accessible to all of us over time, since they simply will not be getting developed at the pace they’ve been in the past. It doesn’t get talked about enough, but the deep cuts to research grants being made today will mean less knowledge will be developed on the ways in which various diseases originate in our bodies, and ultimately, the treatments we develop to cure them. This is the definition of an apolitical issue, and it takes years or decades to reap the benefits of serious and transformative biomedical research: Of the 387 new treatments approved by the FDA between 2010-2019, 386 (99.7 percent) of them received funding from the NIH. In many cases, that funding spanned several years, because scientific discovery simply takes that long to do well.
If anyone asks you, tell them the tale of Wegovy and Ozempic, the new miracle drugs many millions of people are utilizing across the world to help combat obesity. Nearly 35 years ago, at a time when no one was actively thinking of a world with these treatments, the U.S. government was the lone entity that stepped up and funded key research that would help scientists understand what controls our appetite, all at a microscopic level. Fast-forward to 2025; it is because of that very research that the building blocks were in place for incredible innovation that promises a far healthier future for many. We cannot have our cake and eat it too; investments in miracle cures require time and human expertise to bear fruit. We will reap what we sow by today’s deeply misguided decisions.
2. Food Quality and Drug Safety Threatened
We live in a world where we must import a significant portion of our food and drug supply. To do that as safely as possible, we’ve relied on experts at the FDA to do painstaking, detail-oriented work. Legions of these workers were fired recently, with more cuts likely to follow, prompting the question: Will they be replaced, and even more important, by whom? The FDA, like any government agency, can reform and operate better; however, indiscriminate cutting of vital expertise isn’t easily replaceable. Once all of that is gone, it may be impossible to ever claw back.
3. Misinformation and Public Health Information
By all accounts, evidenced-based scientific health information is under attack. In response, long-tenured spokespeople and other leaders for the CDC and FDA are resigning in protest. The communications division of each of these federal agencies—once wholly independent from each other—are now gutted of personnel and rolling up to one person: our incumbent Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is incredibly dangerous, as we’ve seen play out with the ever worsening measles outbreak in the Southern U.S. It is becoming easier to persuade people to take unproven therapies like high doses of vitamin A for this condition, resulting in terrible, life-threatening outcomes. The longer these realities continue to go unaddressed, the more emboldened the purveyors of misinformation will become, harming all of us in the process.
There’s so much more happening across our federal health agencies that is worrisome, but the above three categories stand out, as they will have generational impact on our nation’s health if we do not act in unison soon.
