American Apocalypse: The Trump Regime's Destruction of American Healthcare

ProPublica gives us the numbers behind the coming American death spiral

In January, I posted an article entitled “The Full List of Government Agencies and Programs Frozen by Trump,” which listed every government agency frozen by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director and Project 2025 goon (and editor) Russell Vought.

ProPublica now has some numbers regarding how many federal employees have left critical health agencies that will no longer be able to provide vital assistance with our mental and physical health, preventative or otherwise.

During the onslaught of other regime horrors, many of us have forgotten about the initial blitz of federal cutbacks. A reminder: In January, the OMB issued a two-page memo pausing all federal financial assistance aside from Medicare and Social Security payments. The number of programs affected is staggering, as is the number of fired employees, many of them with years of experience helping Americans navigate basic life functions in ways that we often take for granted.

Artwork created by author using an image from Adobe Stock

The numbers of health agency cutbacks you see in this post were gleaned from the ProPublica story, How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies, by Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala.¹

I always encourage folks to subscribe, preferably with a paid subscription, to ProPublica (they have no paywall or nag screens). They are one of the few remaining responsible adults in the American media room and consistently publish fantastic investigative reports.

I’ll be quoting heavily from them because I’m short on time this morning.

Let’s get to it:

Overall, federal agencies have fired more than 20,500 Workers

Per ProPublica:

Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.

Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses or the mice needed to test vaccines.

And less than five years after a pandemic killed more than a million Americans, scientists who study infectious diseases are struggling to pay for saline solution, gloves and blood to feed lab mosquitoes.

More than 20,500 federal employees have been axed from HHS by RFK Jr.

This number doesn’t include HHS employees who are in a state of limbo for various reasons, such as administrative leave and deadlines under return-to-work (RTO) directives. ProPublica points out that this number could be in the thousands.

Since that dark day in November when the regime stole its way into the Oval Office, federal employees have expressed the pain of living under this state of limbo daily in Reddit communities such as r/FedEmployees and r/fednews.

There, you’ll find hundreds of posts with titles like this: “New DoD litmus test for shitty human being."

They’re miserable and suffering from the worst morale imaginable, but most Americans aren’t aware of their suffering.

ProPublica’s deep dive into staffing cuts at HHS reveals that cutbacks were across the board and included thousands of scientists and researchers: “More than 3,000 scientists and public health specialists” have been fired by JFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department (HHS).

“Over 1,000 regulators and safety inspectors have also left,” according to the ProPublica analysis.

Here are some of the grim numbers:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): 15%

The CDC, of course, helps prevent Ebola (which makes your eyes bleed before it kills you) from entering the United States. That’s just one of the more obvious services it provides, out of hundreds you never hear about.

Specific staffing cuts include:

Immediate Office of the Director: 17%

National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases: 13%

Global Health Center: 8%

National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases: 15%

National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion: 20%

This includes, according to ProPublica:

45% of its oral health division, which protects the teeth of kids whose parents can’t afford dentists

and…

more than 35% of the division that focuses on preventing heart disease and strokes.

National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention: 14%

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health: 16%

National Center for Injury Prevention and Control: 18%

Public Health Infrastructure Center: 18%

National Center for Environmental Health: 17%

National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities: 17%

Strategic National Stockpile: 16%

Deputy Director for Public Health Science and Surveillance: 4%

You might think, “Well, those numbers aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be.”

No. They’re much worse.

According to ProPublica, the CDC has…

…lost senior leaders behind some of the biggest health initiatives of the modern era, like the rapid rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

These numbers include:

1,050 scientists, physicians and public health specialists — many of whom were conducting research and disease surveillance

Many of these cuts are ongoing.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Bobby Brainworm, sometimes referred to as RFK Jr., said the following:

“President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again.”

According to the ProPublica report, his response to this edict was to cut 20% of the CDC’s chronic disease center, half of whom were scientists or staffers plugged into the public health ecosystem.

National Institutes of Health (NIH): 16%

The National Institutes of Health was once the largest source of biomedical research in the world until the regime cut off much of its grant funding.

Like the CDC, the numbers are catastrophic to the nation’s ability to grapple with fundamental issues that the corporations running this country will never touch:

National Cancer Institute: 13%

Office of the Director: 14%

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: 17%

Clinical Center: 12%

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: 17%

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences: 16%

National Library of Medicine: 11%

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development: 22%

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: 19%

National Institute on Aging: 18%

National Institute of Mental Health: 22%

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases: 18%

Center for Information Technology: 16%

Center for Scientific Review: 11%

National Institute on Drug Abuse: 21%

National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences: 22%

National Human Genome Research Institute: 25%

Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health: 20%

National Eye Institute: 18%

National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research: 19%

National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases: 21%

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism: 17%

National Institute of General Medical Sciences: 26%

National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering: 11%

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: 15%

National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities: 29%

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health: 36%

National Institute of Nursing Research: 36%

John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences: 27%

The cutbacks are already hammering away at research in the private and public sectors, especially universities, which rely heavily on NIH grants.

This says nothing of the toll all this attrition takes on the employees who remain, who will probably soon need to hold bake sales if they want to procure anything.

Food and Drug Administration (FDA): 21%

The Food and Drug Administration, fraught as it may historically be with imperfectly administered regulations, helps make sure companies don’t sell you canned vegetables that kill you with botulism.

ProPublica has found that the FDA has lost more than 400 workers who support inspections of everything from dairy farms to seafood processors to blood banks, and who ensure that companies follow federal regulations. More than a third of them worked at its Office of Inspections and Investigations, which serves as the “eyes and ears” of the agency. More than 240 consumer safety specialists have left across the agency, including nearly 40 workers responsible for safeguarding food, plus about 220 chemists, biologists and toxicologists.

According to ProPublica, staffing cuts within the FDA include:

Center for Drug Evaluation and Research: 20%

Office of the Commissioner: 26%

Office of Regulatory Affairs: 16%

Center for Devices and Radiological Health: 22%

Human Foods Program: 20%

Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research: 26%

Center for Tobacco Products:15%

Center for Veterinary Medicine: 23%

National Center for Toxicological Research: 24%

You might wonder how these percentages affect you.

Again, ProPublica with the answer:

“I could walk into a plant and within five minutes could tell you if there was a rodent problem,” said a former division director at the investigations office who left the FDA after inspecting countless facilities over more than two decades. “Once you’ve been in a hot warehouse and you smell rodent urine, it’s like fresh-cut grass, you know exactly what it is the minute you smell it.”

So begins the American Death Spiral

Republicans have been putting pressure on federal agencies to cut staff ever since Ronald Reagan convinced Americans that the federal government, which is not designed to earn profits through its mission to assist Americans — the two goals simply can never sync up — should be run like a business.

Now that Republicans have made so much progress completing their mission, the next disaster or plague is very likely to kill you or people you know.

The regime’s very presence is impacting everyone’s mental health.

It’s an American Apocalypse brought to you by Project 2025 and the voters who chose a crackpot over an intelligent woman and who helped perpetuate the racist backlash against the man the lunatic hates the most.

Pete Souza, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The mad clown’s very election was proof that the state of mental health in America is in steep decline. Thanks to RFK Jr., it’s about to get a lot worse.

It’s up to those of us who’ve managed to avoid being infected by whatever afflicts these voters to spread our message to them, most of whom will suffer the most from this scourge. Many of them won’t even survive until the midterms. We need to reach those who do. We need an impeachable majority in both houses of Congress.

We need to end this.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

Numbers aren’t in yet on rural hospital closures. Those are next on the chopping block thanks to the recent budget bill.

Footnotes

1. “Gutted: How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies.” 2025. ProPublica. August 21, 2025. https://projects.propublica.org/federal-health-worker-cuts-rfk-trump-administration