Former NIH Program Staffer

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Nancy Young's avatar
Nancy Young
Jun 22

This is not getting enough notice: "the federal government is not getting smaller; it is being radically restructured, with massive transfers from domestic, scientific, environmental, and social programs to defense, immigration enforcement, and ideologically aligned priorities." We are so focused on what is being cut (and rightly so!) that we may not be talking enough about what is getting increased (which is terrifying).

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Steve Demetriou's avatar
Steve Demetriou
Aug 7

I wrote to my senators, Collins and King abt cuts to CDC budget:

The Center for Disease Control* has presented information regarding the elimination of public health education on common maladies in their budget under the current OMB budget proposal. It seems to me that the first line of defense the American public has, in particular Maine's rural population already subject to diminished federal funding for public health services, is understanding how families and individuals can avoid health crises by having knowledge about common illnesses and what can be done to mitigate a crisis if and when illness strikes. A perennial complaint from Republicans about "nanny state spending" too often targets the very thing that enables people to pull themselves up. The cuts proposed by our current criminal-led administration in the OMB budget, catering to our country's "socialism for the wealthy" class, does just this. Leaving Americans, in particular Mainers, in the dark about what they can do to make their lives better, more healthy, freer of avoidable and preventable diseases by strangling access to world class public health knowledge isn't in the public's interest. I suspect a program of enforced removal of public health education coupled with diminished public health services funding would end up a more expensive proposition for the State of Maine, more sickness and suffering, more mortality. Evidence supports that suspicion.

I was appalled at cutting off funding for USAID HIV/AIDS and other public health programs, the result of such news being estimates by US university public health research units**, as well as international experts, deaths in the hundreds of thousands to several millions range due to that shortsighted isolationist policy prescription. A quick Google search of the term "documented deaths of HIV/AIDS sufferers from cutting USAID funding" returns estimates from several leading US universities, Boston University, University of Minnesota, University of Maryland School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco predicting many millions more likely to die. An administration taking advice on such issues from non-expert, self-aggrandizing idiots like Elon Musk should be denied implementation of such advice. I hope you will stand up as a line of defense against the idiocy of such incompetence and self-interested grandstanding. I lost a cousin to AIDS in the early days of the epidemic when government was denying its importance.

Public health education helps Americans lead informed and better lives. Cutting such funding is shortsighted. A lack of education never ends well for those denied available knowledge. That was borne out by the elevated mortality during the COVID pandemic in Republican-led states notable for following the advice of naysayers against the expert advice of our leading scientists doing their level best to understand and respond to the attack by a novel virus on the public. Let's not create systemic ignorance by denying the public the best of world class knowledge in the realm of public health.

*https://www.cdcdataproject.org/explore-changes-to-cdcs-budget

**https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/mathematician-tracks-deaths-from-usaid-medicaid-cuts/

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