The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has virtually stopped communicating urgent health information to the public due to cuts imposed by the Trump administration.
Newsletters, health alerts and social media accounts have largely gone silent since president Donald Trump returned to office in January, but health emergencies – including measles, salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A and C outbreaks – have not paused, and current and former CDC workers told NPR that the disruption in communications put Americans at risk from contagious and chronic disease.
"We are functionally unable to operate communications," said one of the CDC workers. "We feel like our hands are tied behind our backs."
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The CDC previously managed most of its own communications before Trump was inaugurated with little interference from the Department of Health and Human Services, which now owns its social media channels but rarely posts content – although CDC employees were disturbed by an April 7 post highlighting HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s visit with a family whose 6-year-old daughter who died from measles.
"Secretary Kennedy's directive is for CDC to lead the nation in health readiness and response," the post read, linking to a message from Kennedy's own X account about his visit to Gaines County, Texas. "His visit to Texas Sunday, to support the state's efforts to control the measles outbreak, resulted in discussions with Texas state health officials to deploy another CDC response team to the area to further assist with the state's efforts to protect its citizens against measles and its complications."
Three of the current CDC employees told NPR the post was essentially "propaganda," although Kevin Griffis, who served as the director of communications at the CDC until March, didn't see anything wrong with retweeting a cabinet secretary.
"What's undermines the credibility of CDC communications moving forward is the near cessation of pro-vaccination and apolitical public health messages in favor of messages that amplify the secretary," Griffis said. "That makes it a political channel."
More than 12 million people subscribe to the CDC's accounts on Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn, but communications staffers say HHS hasn't been clearing posts for publication quickly enough to communicate health information to the public, and they have recommended fewer posts because they expect many of them to be rejected.
"Everything is getting bottlenecked at the top," said one worker. "It is extraordinarily time-consuming and backlogs us by weeks, if not months."
Thousands of federal health workers were laid off by Kennedy on April 1 as part of a government-wide "reduction in force," and those cuts included nearly everyone at CDC who primary responsibility was to communicate with the media or provide records to the public, and every single member of its digital media team was laid off.
"All the points of contact that we generally rely on to communicate with the American people have either been eliminated or dramatically reduced," said Griffis, who was among those cut.
Eliminating all the agency's web developers, graphic designers and social media staffers created a new problem, three sources said, because the CDC was suddenly locked out of its social media accounts.
"The passwords to those accounts were kept on a password protected Word doc," said one CDC worker, "and that Word doc was inaccessible for anyone left, because all of the people that could have opened that document were fired."
However, Andrew Nixon, the director of communications at HHS, insisted that CDC officials had access to their X account, and, indeed, someone has reposted two more tweets from Kennedy's account since the tweet about his visit to Texas, compared to 90 posts in April 2024 on the CDC's main X account.
"The CDC has access to their X account - it's that simple," Nixon said. "CDC is an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and supports Secretary Kennedy's vision to protect public health and Make America Healthy Again."
"It's unfortunate to see career officials spreading false rumors," Nixon added.