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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
‘MAHA Report’ calls for fighting chronic disease, but Trump and
Kennedy have yanked funding
By David Hilzenrath, KFF Health News
Updated:
6:15 AM EDT, Tue July 1, 2025
Source: CNN
The Trump administration has declared that it will aggressively combat
chronic disease in America.
Yet in its feverish purge of federal health programs, it has proposed
eliminating the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and
Health Promotion and its annual funding of $1.4 billion.
That’s one of many disconnects between what the administration says
about health — notably, in the “” that President Donald Trump at
the White House — and what it’s actually doing, scientists and
public health advocates say.
Among other contradictions:
“There are many inconsistencies between rhetoric and action,” said
Alonzo Plough, chief science officer at the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, a philanthropy focused on health.
The report, a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s “Make America
Healthy Again” agenda, was issued by a commission that includes
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other
top administration officials.
News organizations found that it and that it was produced with help
from artificial intelligence. White House Press Secretary Karoline
Leavitt described the problems as “formatting issues,” and the
administration revised the report.
Trump to assess causes of a “childhood chronic disease crisis.” His
commission is now working on a plan of action.
Spokespeople for the White House and Department of Health and Human
Services did not respond to questions for this article.
Studies derailed
The MAHA report says environmental chemicals may pose risks to
children’s health. Citing the National Institutes of Health, it said
there’s a “need for continued studies from the public and private
sectors, especially the NIH, to better understand the cumulative load
of multiple exposures and how it may impact children’s health.”
Meanwhile, the administration has cut funding for related studies.
For example, in 2020 the Environmental Protection Agency ways of
researching children’s exposure to chemicals from soil and dust. It
said that, for kids ages 6 months to 6 years, ingesting particulates
— by putting their hands on the ground or floor then in their mouths
— could be a significant means of exposure to contaminants such as
herbicides, pesticides, and a group of chemicals known as PFAS.
— for almost $1.4 million over several years — went to at Johns
Hopkins University and the University of California-San Francisco.
Researchers gained permission to collect samples from people’s homes,
including dust and diapers.
But, beyond a small test run, they didn’t get to analyze the urine
and stool samples because the grant was terminated this spring, said
study leader Keeve Nachman, a professor of environmental health and
engineering at Hopkins.
“The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA
funding priorities,” the agency said in a May 10 termination notice.
Another from 2020 addressed many of the issues the MAHA report
highlighted: cumulative exposures to chemicals and developmental
problems such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, obesity,
anxiety, and depression. One of the resulting grants funded the at the
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. That grant was ended weeks
early in May, said the center’s director, Stephanie Engel, a UNC
professor of epidemiology.
In a statement, EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch said the agency “is
continuing to invest in research and labs to advance the mission of
protecting human health and the environment.” Due to an agency
reorganization, “the way these grants are administered will be
different going forward,” said Hirsch, who did not otherwise answer
questions about specific grants.
In its battle with Harvard, the Trump administration has stopped paying
for research the NIH had commissioned on topics such as how autism to
paternal exposure to air pollution.
The loss of millions of dollars of NIH funding has also undermined
data-gathering for long-term research on chronic diseases, Harvard
researchers said. A series of projects with names like Nurses’ Health
Study II and Nurses’ Health Study 3 have been tracking thousands of
people for decades and aimed to keep tracking them as long as possible
as well as enrolling new participants, even across generations.
The work has included periodically surveying participants — mainly
nurses and other health professionals who enrolled to support science
— and collecting biological samples such as blood, urine, stool, or
toenail clippings.
Researchers studying health problems such as autism, ADHD, or cancer
could tap the data and samples to trace potential contributing factors,
said Francine Laden, an environmental epidemiologist at Harvard’s
T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The information could
retrospectively reveal exposures before people were born — when they
were still in utero — and exposures their parents experienced before
they were conceived.
Harvard expected that some of the grants wouldn’t be renewed, but the
Trump administration brought ongoing funding to an abrupt end, said
Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Chan
school.
As a result, researchers are scrambling to find money to keep following
more than 200,000 people who enrolled in studies beginning in the 1980s
— including children of participants who are now adults themselves
— and to preserve about 2 million samples, Willett said.
“So now our ability to do exactly what the administration wants to do
is jeopardized,” said Jorge Chavarro, a professor of nutrition and
epidemiology at the Chan school. “And there’s not an equivalent
resource. It’s not like you can magically recreate these resources
without having to wait 20 or 30 years to be able to answer the
questions” that the Trump administration “wants answered now.”
Over the past few months, the administration has fired or pushed out
almost 5,000 NIH employees, blocked almost $3 billion in grant funding
from being awarded, and terminated almost 2,500 grants totaling almost
$5 billion, said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate
Appropriations Committee, at a on the NIH budget.
In addition, research institutions have been waiting months to receive
money under grants they’ve already been awarded, Murray said.
In canceling hundreds of grants with race, gender, or sexuality
dimensions, the administration engaged in blatant discrimination, a
federal judge ruled on June 16.
Cutting funding
After issuing the MAHA report, the administration published to cut
funding for the NIH by $17.0 billion, or 38%, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention by $550 million, or 12%, by $5 billion, or
54%.
“This budget reflects the President’s vision of making Americans
the healthiest in the world while achieving his goal of transforming
the bureaucracy,” the HHS “Budget in Brief” document says.
Elements of Trump’s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year clash
with priorities laid out in the MAHA report.
Kennedy has cited diabetes as part of a crisis in children’s health.
The $1.4 billion unit the White House to eliminate at the CDC — the
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion —
has housed a program to track diabetes in children, adolescents, and
young adults.
“To say that you want to focus on chronic diseases” and then “to,
for all practical purposes, eliminate the entity at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention which does chronic diseases,” said
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health
Association, “obviously doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
In a May letter, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell
Vought as “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary,” using an
abbreviation for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Within the NIH, the White House has proposed cutting $320 million from
the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a reduction of
35%. That unit funds or conducts a wide array of research on issues
such as chronic disease.
Trump’s budget proposes spending $500 million “to tackle priority
activities to Make America Healthy Again,” including $260 million for
his new Administration for a Healthy America to address the “chronic
illness epidemic.”
Ceding ground to industry
The MAHA report argues that corporate influence has compromised
government agencies and public health through “corporate capture.”
It alleges that most research on chronic childhood diseases is funded
by the food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries, as well as
special interest organizations and professional associations. It says,
for example, that a “significant portion of environmental toxicology
and epidemiology studies are conducted by private corporations,”
including pesticide manufacturers, and it cites “potential biases in
industry-funded research.”
It’s “self-evident that cutbacks in federal funding leave the field
open to the very corporate funding RFK has decried,” said Peter
Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a
watchdog group focused on food and health.
Lurie shared the report’s concern about industry-funded research but
said ceding ground to industry won’t help. “Industry will tend to
fund those studies that look to them like they will yield results
beneficial to industry,” he said.
In search of new funding sources, Harvard’s school of public health
“is now ramping up targeted outreach to potential corporate partners,
with careful review to ensure the science meets the highest standards
of research integrity,” Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the school’s
faculty, wrote in a to students, faculty, and others.
“It’s just simple math that if you devastate governmental funding
by tens of billions of dollars, then the percentage of industry funding
dollars will go up,” said Plough, who is also a clinical professor at
the University of Washington School of Public Health.
“So therefore, what they claim to fear more,” he said, will
“become even more influential.”
The MAHA report says “the U.S. government is committed to fostering
radical transparency and gold-standard science.”
But many scientists and other scholars see the Trump administration
waging a war on science that conflicts with its agenda.
In March, members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
and Medicine of “destroying” scientific independence, “engaging
in censorship,” and “pressuring researchers to alter or abandon
their work on ideological grounds.”
In May, wrote that the administration was politicizing research — for
example, by halting or censoring work on health disparities, health
impacts of climate change, gender identity, and immunizations.
Recent comments by Kennedy pose another threat to transparency,
researchers and health advocates say.
Kennedy said that he would probably create in-house government journals
and stop NIH scientists from publishing their research in The Lancet,
The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American
Medical Association, and others.
Creating new government outlets for research would be a plus, said
Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the
Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
But confining government scientists to government journals, he said,
“would be a disaster” and “would basically amount to
censorship.”
“That’s just not a good idea for science,” Mozaffarian said.
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