1. United States
2. Alaska
3. Letter

The severe cuts to HHS that was announced will hobble our country and create a brain drain. The administrations claims that such deep cuts to the FDA, CDC and NIH and CMS won’t be harmful are preposterous. The huge cuts will have a devastating impact on public health services across the US. The senseless and destructive RIF would not only harm employees but will deprive the American people of vital services. For instance the cuts at CMS focus on the workers that troubleshoot problems that arise for Medicare beneficiaries and Affordable Care Act enrollees. The result of those cuts will be the lowest customer care standards for thousands of cases. Beyond losing workers entire agencies some of which were established by Congress will be shuttered. Those include the Health Resources and Service Administration which oversees and provides funding for community health centers around the country as well as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration which was created by Congress in 1992. It is clear that pushing 20,000 workers out of preeminent health agencies will not make Americans healthier. It just will mean fewer health services for our community, more opportunities for diseases to spread, less preparation for the next pandemic and longer waits for lifesaving treatments and cures. Trumps appointments to head the various public health agencies are all conspiracy theorists who don’t follow science. Jay Bhattacharya was the author of the nonsensical Great Barrington Declaration proposing to let Covid rip that was widely debunked by the scientific community. The plan to protect only the vulnerable but let everyone get infected ignored the risk of long covid, the burden on health care systems and the reality that isolating only the vulnerable was impossible in practice. Dr. Mehmet Oz who is pop picked to lead the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services repeatedly showed disdain for evidence based medicine and manifested and egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of financial gain. The United States already has less public servants and spent less money per capital compared to the GDP than other industrialized nations. Cutting tons of public health jobs, hiring conspiracy nutters who don’t follow science and allowing conspiracy nutters who publish studies in quack journals with no peer review and get studies retracted.