The Trump Administration has said it will revolutionize public health, and particularly improve children’s health, by taking on the food industry and fighting back against corporate capture of regulatory agencies. At the same time, the Administration will unburden taxpayers by cutting government waste, and relieve consumers by cutting regulations that hold back competition.
The Administration’s record so far, however, tells a different story. As the Republican reconciliation bill works its way through the House, and details of the “big beautiful bill” emerge, signs of any purported devotion to improving the lives of America’s children, or to helping them live longer, are conspicuously absent.
Consider lead. HHS Secretary Kennedy’s chaotic, April Fool’s Day “restructuring” of the Department of Health and Human Services, featured the dismissal of 10,000 workers. These included all of the staff from a division at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) dedicated to environmental health, including the prevention of lead poisoning.
Some readers may recall the lead poisoning outbreak in 2023 linked to Wanabana cinnamon applesauce pouches. Unscrupulous food companies can boost profits through so-called “food fraud,” adding lead-based dyes to spices like cinnamon to bulk up the product and give it the right color. FDA investigators theorized that a Wanabana cinnamon supplier committed the food fraud in this case. When children first started getting sick, however, state public health authorities had little to go on. Most lead poisoning is cause by things like paint chips, not apple sauce.
CDC’s Environmental Health Division, the one that’s gone now, helped connect the dots. It coordinated how the state and local public health agencies surveyed case patients, eventually homing in on the outbreak’s source. The outbreak culminated in an official case count of 566, but many more kids were affected before public health authorities had sufficient information to pull the poisoned pouches from store shelves. Now many of those public health authorities have been fired.
On April 3, Kennedy told press he would reinstate the disbanded division and its staff. But subsequent budget plans have not accounted for it, nor for the national lead exposure registry, and we have only a vague assurance that the Division’s work will get carried out by someone, somewhere in the forthcoming “Administration for a Healthy America.” In the meantime, how many kids would need to get lead poisoning for us to catch a similar outbreak right now?
The latest version of the House reconciliation bill does not weigh in on children’s lead exposure but it takes a stand on children’s health nonetheless. The bill would save $660 million by the terminating USDA grants for local food to schools programs. Is this what Secretary Kennedy means by “dramatic changes in the school food”? The House bill further aims to save $92 million with work requirements for SNAP recipients with children age seven or older. Hope you have the iPad battery charged parents. Even some Republicans have blanched. Sen. Josh Hawley expressed dismay that the House would so aggressively pursue an agenda of “taxing poor people.”
But apparently such is the business of Making America Healthy Again, back when most adults smoked and the gas station gave you lead. Or perhaps to some other era, like the 1500s. Many accounts of European colonists indicate the Native Americans were much healthier judging by their height and physique, although recent research suggests their health was “on decline before Columbus arrived.” Blame agriculture.
Whatever happened in the past, the Trump Administration may likely usher in a new era of precipitous declines in indigenous people’s health. The Administration’s budget cuts funding for core tribal programs by nearly one-quarter, including a $617 million cut to Bureau of Indian Affairs programs that support tribal self-governance and communities.
Many of these communities would also be harmed by cuts in the President’s budget proposing to eliminate four federal programs designed to prevent underage drinking. For the last two decades, since Congress passed the Sober Truth on Preventing Underage Drinking (STOP) Act, with broad bipartisan support, these programs have helped to reduce underage drinking by double digits. Despite the declines, underage drinking remains an incredible drag on the economy, costing the country more than $24 billion each year, setting people up for a lifetime of addiction, and driving many of the leading preventable causes of death among young people. The STOP programs, at annual cost of just $20.5 million, are some of the most cost-effective federal expenditures as measured by dollars per life years saved. Rather than asserting their authority to keep these programs running, however, House members are apparently more interested in shilling for Big Alcohol and challenging the science that alcohol causes cancer. (Sorry, it does).
Congress can still do the right thing. It can challenge the President’s unlawful impoundment of appropriations. It can restore critical public health infrastructure cut by the DOGE chainsaw. It can act to prevent the Administration from snatching more people off the street and sending them to a foreign prison without due process. But Republicans have shown little interest in such measures so far. That may change as their constituents come to understand what they stand to lose, and the basic contours of a bill that will knock millions of Americans off Medicaid and add trillions to the federal debt in order to cut taxes for the wealthy—a full $211 billion of the bill’s cost will go towards raising the estate and gift tax exclusion for millionaires (from $28 million to $30 million for couples!). In the meantime, we can expect the MAHA MAGA split personality disorder to continue.