Public Health & Health Policy > Political Pulse

Trump is firing your peers—here's what's at stake

By Claire Wolters | Fact-checked by Davi Sherman

Published February 20, 2025

Key Takeaways

Industry Buzz

"Indiscriminate NIH cuts [affect] the core ability of this country to be at the forefront of biomedical research, and that's going to have ripple effects in the economy, and it will have effects many years down the line in terms of an inability for us to be able to innovate and bring new drugs [and] treatments to the population." — Virologist Andrew Pekosz, PhD
"It's hard to rebuild a foundation once it's been destroyed.” — Virologist Andrew Pekosz, PhD

The Trump administration is terminating thousands of federal health agency workers across the United States.^[] These firings come at a time of ongoing disease outbreaks and healthcare shortages that have cut the number of practicing nurses and physicians.

Andrew Pekosz, PhD, a professor and vice chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says that staff cuts could lead to surges in various diseases and a weakened ability to fight future pandemics.

While the full extent of President Trump’s healthcare purge is yet to be seen, its impacts so far are hard to ignore.

Check out all our coverage on how the new administration is impacting public health—and what your peers are saying about it—here:

Job cuts take a stab at vaccine development

Staff at health agencies like the CDC are among those being fired—or at risk of their jobs being cut. Among other things, CDC workers play a critical role in collecting data on and approving vaccines. Terminating CDC workers could lead to reductions in both the quality and quantity of data provided, with detrimental impacts on public health amid viral disease outbreaks.

Dr. Pekosz reminds people that while the COVID-19 vaccines were being created and updated, the CDC “played a very important role in … tracking viruses and reporting [on] things like the efficacy of current vaccines and how new variants are recognized by those vaccines.”

With fewer staff at work, Dr. Pekosz says, “a lot of that information is going to be lost, which will put stress on the annual updating of vaccines.”

Cuts could hinder disease outbreak investigations

Many members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), which falls under the CDC, have also been fired in the last week.^[] The EIS is the CDC’s “globally recognized applied epidemiology training program” made up of post-doctoral fellows.^[] The group is trained to investigate and respond to various public health emergencies and threats.

EIS cuts are particularly worrisome due to the role the workers play in investigating and handling disease outbreaks, Dr. Pekosz says.

“We know from infectious disease work in the past that when an outbreak happens, we have to investigate it quickly because that's the best way to try to contain it,” Dr. Pekosz says. “We will be very much hindered if we don't have enough of those EIS officers to be responding to things, like the tuberculosis outbreaks in Kansas or the H5N1 outbreaks across the US.”^[]

Weakening of a once-strong foundation of researchers

Lab workers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have similarly been fired.^[] But NIH cuts have unique consequences, Dr. Pekosz says, as they threaten to tear apart a once-robust network of health researchers. It takes time to build such a strong system, he adds, and if the government is to quickly tear the NIH apart, it is unlikely to be restored within the same timeframe.

"If you lose people, they're not going to come back a year later when funding gets returned."

— Andrew Pekosz, PhD

“People move on to other positions, [and] laboratories can't keep research projects going," Dr. Pekosz says. "There are some very long-term consequences of massive, indiscriminate NIH cuts to the core ability of this country to be at the forefront of biomedical research, and that's going to have ripple effects in the economy, and it will have effects many years down the line in terms of an inability for us to be able to innovate and bring new drugs [and] treatments to the population.”

“It's hard to rebuild a foundation once it's been destroyed,” he adds.