Budget cuts impacting effectiveness of U.S. public health system, analysis finds

State and local health departments responsible for invisible but critical work such as inspecting restaurants, monitoring wastewater for new and harmful germs, responding to outbreaks before they get too big — and a host of other tasks to protect both individuals and communities — are being hollowed out by changes in federal policy (Source: “Deep cuts erode the foundations of U.S. public health system, end progress, threaten worse to come,” Associated Press, May 31).
 
The Trump administration is cutting health spending on an unprecedented scale, experts say, including pulling $11 billion of direct federal support because the pandemic is over and eliminating 20,000 jobs at national health agencies that in part assist and support local public health work. It’s proposing billions more be slashed.
 
Together, public health leaders said, the cuts are reducing the entire system to a shadow of what it once was, threatening to undermine even routine work at a time when the nation faces the deadliest measles outbreak since at least the 1990s, rising whooping cough cases and the risk that bird flu could spread widely among people.
 
The moves reflect a shift that Americans may not fully realize, away from the very idea of public health: doing the work that no individual can do alone to safeguard the population as a whole.