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Trump administration appointees are asserting control over the enormous US federal health department after the president’s inauguration this week – pausing public communications and abruptly canceling scientific meetings.
While temporary communications pauses are not entirely abnormal as new administrations find their feet, the orders come at a time of high anxiety for US scientists and public health workers.
Trump allies called for major restructuring of scientific agencies during his campaign; Trump has nominated one of the world’s foremost vaccine skeptics, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to lead the health department, and the previous Trump administration had a track record of pushing to censor scientists.
“[The Department of Health and Human Services] (HHS) has issued a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health,” a spokesperson for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told Stat News in a statement.
“This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization. There are exceptions for announcements that HHS divisions believe are mission critical, but they will be made on a case-by-case basis.”
Acting health secretary Dorothy Fink told staff an “immediate pause” was ordered on regulations, guidance, announcements, press releases, social media posts and website posts until communications could be approved by a political appointee, according to reporting by the Association Press.
Officials at HHS oversee the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research at the NIH, the gold standard scientific review agency for medicines at the Food and Drug Administration, the world’s foremost public health authority at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which provides or regulates health insurance for 136 million US residents.
The department controls a roughly $1.8tn budget that helps keep Americans safe and makes the US the world’s leader in scientific research.
The new administration has also broken with past precedent by failing to appoint an acting head of the CDC, leaving a leadership vacuum at the agency tasked with keeping Americans safe from infectious disease outbreaks, CBS reported.
And, in just one example of notably absent scientific communication, the CDC has failed to send out the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, known in scientific and medical circles simply as MMWR. The report details outbreaks and investigations undertaken by agency scientists, and is a resource for infectious disease managers nationally.
Alongside the lack of communications, scientific meetings within the NIH were also canceled. These meetings are required by law to issue grant funding to research laboratories across the country, and cancelations could result in delays as the advisers on grant funding often have busy schedules. The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research, with a budget of roughly $47bn.
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The new administration has also canceled meetings of the vaccine advisory committee and a committee on antibiotic resistance, according to Stat.
Alongside the pause in communications, the Senate is also considering Trump’s nominees for cabinet-level positions, with the potential for far-reaching health impacts.
Trump’s nominee to run the office of management and budget (OMB), Russell T Vought, expressed support for work requirements in Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income Americans that covers 69 million people (including about 40 million children).
Traditionally, the program has not included work requirements, which research has shown do not result in higher employment but manage to exclude people from social safety net programs because of onerous paperwork.
“It’s informed not only Medicaid, but other programs, to be able to encourage people to get back into the work force, increase labor force participation and give people again the dignity of work,” he told members of the Senate budget committee, according to the New York Times.
In the first Trump administration, officials approved programs in 13 states to institute work requirements – programs that were largely undone by the Biden administration. At the time, the Trump administration described the work requirements as a way to increase “community engagement”.
