On August 27, 2025, at the behest of Kennedy, the White House terminated Dr. Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since her confirmation by the U.S. Senate in late July 2025, because she clashed with Kennedy and his staff members over inaccurate and unscientific changes they wanted to make to guidance on vaccines. Following her unjustified firing, four high-ranking CDC officials resigned in protest.

Since the beginning of the Second Trump Administration and under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has attempted to cut an estimated 20,000 jobs at the agency through layoffs, early retirements, and buyouts. Nearly 10,000 of those are layoffs. This affected workers in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (lost 3,500 employees, 20% of the FDA workforce), and the CDC (lost 2,400 employees, 20% of the CDC workforce). The federal government lost experts who coordinated travel for overseas drug facility inspectors, food safety professionals, drug approval experts, communications staff members, public records officials, and employees who oversaw contracts related to medical research. Some workers who were arbitrarily fired had to be rehired after HHS officials realized there were “gaps in our ability to perform our duties.” Nineteen states and D.C. have sued the Trump Administration over these massive layoffs, arguing that the layoffs have impacted states’ abilities to protect public health by cutting off access to data, making it harder to access grants, and shuttering essential disease testing labs.

Under Kennedy, HHS has withheld billions of dollars of funding that Congress appropriated for specific recipients and purposes. This includes unlawfully withholding roughly $12 billion in federal child care funding for the Head Start program, which serves roughly 800,000 children up to the age of 5 and freezing $8 billion in health research funding to the National Institutes of Health.

Kennedy shockingly cancelled funding for 22 projects worth nearly $500 million for mRNA vaccine research. mRNA technology was essential to the rapid development and deployment of a COVID-19 vaccine, saving millions of lives during the pandemic. Instead of supporting such research, Kennedy announced that mRNA technology posed “more risk than benefits” for respiratory viruses, contradicting the scientific consensus. Our ability to combat future iterations of coronavirus strains and other diseases will now be severely jeopardized. 

On March 25, 2025, HHS announced without warning that it would pull back $11.4 billion in congressionally-appropriated COVID-era funding to state and local public health departments and other health organizations. Though much of the funding was used for COVID-specific activities, it was also authorized for other public health needs, such as wastewater surveillance, vaccinations, infection control activities, and community health workers. State and local health partners have also had to struggle for information, grants, and other support as many of the federal employees and divisions they coordinated with have been laid off or restructured.

Trump has also issued, and Kennedy has implemented, a series of executive orders prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the federal government, including at NIH, which receives billions of dollars from Congress to fund medical research at universities, hospitals, and other institutions. This has drastically curtailed funding for health equity research aimed at narrowing health gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups. NIH initially terminated at least 616 projects focused on health disparities. In other instances, lead investigators lost their grant awards because of affiliations with universities that Trump has accused of antisemitism. Loss of such funding will likely impact efforts to improve poor health in minority communities, low-income and rural areas, and among Americans with disabilities. It also significantly hinders research into, and slows medical advancements related to, widespread health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and dementia.

On June 9, 2025, Kennedy announced that he was removing all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes recommendations on the safety, efficacy, and clinical need of vaccines. The politically motivated removals allow the Trump Administration to circumvent the terms of the sitting ACIP members and obtain appointments he otherwise would not have been able to make until 2028. By firing the current experts and stacking ACIP with vaccine skeptics who are loyal to Kennedy and Trump instead of to the science or the public’s wellbeing, the Trump Administration has deprived the public of authoritative, data-driven guidance on vaccines and disease prevention.

Kennedy has repeatedly shared health misinformation in ways that jeopardize public health. During the measles outbreak in Texas, Kennedy suggested that good nutrition, vitamin A, steroids, and cod liver oil can be used to prevent and treat measles, refused to recommend that parents vaccinate their children, and refused to share with the public the long-standing and well-supported scientific consensus that the safest and best way to prevent measles is to increase the vaccination rate. In May 2025, the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission chaired by Kennedy released a report on the crisis of chronic disease in children that contained citations to studies that did not exist. The report also suggested, against scientific consensus, that routine childhood vaccinations may be harmful.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, key food safety programs have been rolled back at HHS, putting more Americans at risk of contracting foodborne illnesses. By June 2025, nearly 1 in 5 positions were vacant at the FDA’s human food inspection divisions. With the layoffs of health communications specialists and added requirements to get approval for public announcements from senior officials at HHS, many agencies housed within HHS have lost their ability to urgently communicate important information directly to the public.

In addition to undermining funding for health research and denigrating the expertise of professional scientists, Kennedy has permitted the continued scrubbing of healthcare data from federal health websites in response to Trump’s numerous directives vilifying  sex and gender, diversity, equity and inclusion, and foreign aid. Many national health surveys, indices, and dashboards went offline on January 31, 2025, shortly before Kennedy’s confirmation. Since then, some pages and data have returned under court order, while others have been altered. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Tom Frieden has stated that the CDC website can no longer be trusted. Injecting uncertainty about the reliability of this data directly harms the health of Americans and could impair medical treatment, hinder disease tracking and surveillance, worsen health policy, and diminish public trust in healthcare.

The Trump Administration unlawfully attempted to expel and remove from the country hundreds of Guatemalan child refugees who crossed into the United States alone. These children are under the care of the HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. With almost no warning on August 31, 2025, the Trump Administration and ICE bypassed procedures, picked up children from shelters, and loaded them onto planes, as a judge convened a weekend hearing to block their removal. Indeed, a government attorney admitted that one plane may have taken off, and turned around only because the hearing had convened. Some of the children had active immigration cases pending; all were denied sufficient notice, due process, and the special protections afforded to children under U.S. immigration law. Absent the temporary court order, the children would have been returned to Guatemala to face the abuse and violence from which they fled.