The initiation of mass firings of over 20,000 scientists and public health workers at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) marks a historic turning point in the collapse of American democracy and the Trump administration’s efforts to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States.
Trump’s war on science and public health, overseen by the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has now evolved into a scorched-earth policy of social vandalism, in which all the medical and scientific gains made by countless scientists and public health workers are being decimated overnight.
For Trump and the financial oligarchy he represents, the enemy in this war is the international working class, whom they are determined to reduce to conditions of industrial slavery and barbarism on a scale not seen since the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. Under the Orwellian banner “Make America Healthy Again,” Trump and Kennedy are deliberately creating the conditions for the flourishing of infectious diseases, the proliferation of pseudoscience and the steady decline of life expectancy for masses of workers across the US and throughout the world.
Tuesday’s mass firings coincided with the swearing-in of Trump’s new directors of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Martin Makary. Bhattacharya is most notorious for co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, the “herd immunity” manifesto that justifies a policy of mass infection, death and debilitation with COVID-19. Makary adopted this policy, while both figures promoted anti-vaccine disinformation and denigrated virtually all other public health measures throughout the pandemic.
Kennedy greeted their swearing-in Tuesday with the declaration, “The revolution begins today!” By this he meant a social counterrevolution against all remaining vestiges of public health and scientific integrity at the CDC, FDA and every other HHS agency.
It is impossible to succinctly present all that took place on April 1, as thousands of employees at HHS and its 13 subsidiary agencies awoke to emails informing them of their firings. Among the most significant developments are the following:
- At the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 880 of 1,100 employees were fired, eliminating research into mining safety, chemical exposure and more.
- Eighty percent of the staff at the CDC’s Global Health Center were laid off, crippling outbreak detection in over 40 countries.
- The CDC’s Chronic Disease Prevention sub-agency was dissolved, ending diabetes and heart disease tracking in 30 states.
Over 300 positions were cut at the HIV Prevention Division, with estimates that over 20 million patients across Africa will now be cut off from life-saving assistance through PEPFAR.
The CDC’s Environmental Health Science division was eliminated, halting PFAS toxicity studies and more.
The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) was disbanded, ending firearm mortality tracking.
The entire staff of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) was terminated.
At the NIH, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) was closed, ending $500 million in grants to address racial health disparities, and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) was shuttered.
450 of 900 employees at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) were fired.
At the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), 80 employees were terminated, weakening national stockpile management and pandemic forecasting.
Among those targeted were agency heads, with at least nine directors of agencies either fired or placed on administrative leave, while several other senior leaders were reassigned.
Five of the 10 HHS regional offices were closed, including in Boston, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.
At numerous agencies, communications teams were gutted, preventing future notices on a wide range of critical health issues to both the American and world’s populations.
All of these savage cuts will have far-reaching global ramifications, but arguably the most ominous are those targeting agencies overseeing the nationwide outbreak of H5N1 “bird flu” among poultry and dairy farms.
In addition to the aforementioned firings at the CDC’s Global Health Center and ASPR, 140 staff were fired at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, including critical leadership and administrative staff. These three centers collaborate with the US Department of Agriculture to track the spread of the bird flu, which numerous scientists have warned threatens to become the next pandemic. Historically, bird flu has had a 50 percent fatality rate among humans.
Last month, Kennedy and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins both proposed to let the virus rip through poultry farms instead of culling infected birds. This insane policy, widely denounced by scientists, would effectively give the virus tens of millions of hosts to evolve, with researchers warning that only one mutation is needed for the development of human-to-human transmission. Were such a policy now put in place, there would be no effective mechanisms to track or report on the nationwide spread of bird flu, which could very well spark the next global pandemic.
The events on Tuesday, which multiple sources have described as a “bloodbath,” follow a series of unprecedented attacks on public health and science by Trump and Kennedy, of which the following were most significant:
On January 24, Trump withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and imposed unprecedented gag orders across all 13 HHS agencies.
Thousands of pages of scientific information have been modified or removed from the websites of the CDC, NIH, FDA and other HHS agencies, a form of modern-day book burning.
On February 7, NIH spending on facilities and administration was slashed by $4 billion, nearly 50 percent of the current $9 billion allocation, affecting research grants at universities nationwide.
Kennedy has downplayed the worsening measles outbreak in Texas, instead promoting quack remedies like cod liver oil and initiating a fraudulent “study” into the link between vaccines and autism, to be headed by anti-vaccine activist David Geier.
Declaring “the pandemic is over,” the HHS has halted NIH-funded research into Long COVID and next-generation vaccines.
Last week, the HHS rescinded its Scientific Integrity Policy, allowing political appointees to censor or alter studies contradicting administration narratives.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cut 1,000 positions, including National Weather Service staff critical for hurricane tracking.
The NIH has canceled all studies on transgender healthcare.
- On March 20, Trump signed an Executive Order to initiate the dismantling of the Department of Education
The State Department has revoked hundreds of student visas and even green cards via AI-driven social media monitoring, targeting pro-Palestine activists, including Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Cornell’s Momodou Taal.
On March 5, Trump threatened to defund any institution allowing “illegal protests,” demanding expulsion or deportation of participants, with multiple campuses immediately complying with the orders.
What emerges from this barrage of reaction is a clear and definite policy of fascist counter-revolution. Dominant sections of the American ruling class are determined to destroy all of the social gains won by the working class during the 20th century, and they have selected Trump as their Führer to carry this out.
The Nazi concept of Gleichschaltung—“synchronization” or “falling into line”—entailed the subversion of academic freedom, the driving out of Jewish scientists and the reshaping of German society into a fascist dictatorship, in the process undermining all of the core concepts of the Enlightenment, human progress and philosophical materialism.
Today, Trump demands the same falling into line, with Kennedy carrying this out in the sphere of public health. They are reviving the outlook advocated by Hermann Göring at a June 1934 speech in Wassertrüdingen, when he declared, “Real leaders are born of blood and soil and have no need for science and culture.”
What is now unfolding is a dramatic and sudden reversal of the nearly century-long dominance of American scientific prowess.
Over the course of World War II, the United States emerged as the global center for scientific research and innovation, with many of the above agencies either founded or reconstituted during this period. Europe’s greatest scientists, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, fled fascism and sought refuge in the US. This initial “brain drain” fueled by fascism continued in the post-war period, as the US became a magnet for top scientific talent from throughout the world.
Through the deepening integration of these federal agencies with academia, numerous scientific breakthroughs were achieved which have collectively saved billions of people from premature death, raised life expectancies globally and profoundly shaped modern society.
The greatest scientific achievements made through this collaboration included the development of mass production techniques for penicillin in the 1940s; vaccines to prevent polio, HPV, Ebola, COVID-19 and other pathogens; therapies and treatments for HIV/AIDS, bipolar disorder, breast cancer, heart disease and a myriad of other chronic diseases; the Green Revolution in agriculture; the Human Genome Project; MRI technology; virtually all of the advances associated with modern computing technologies and the Internet; and literally thousands more medical and technological breakthroughs.
This scientific progress was always bound up with and constrained by Cold War geopolitics and the efforts of American imperialism to undermine the Soviet Union, while access to higher education remained limited for large sections of the working class. But the advances made still had vast objective significance.
With the coming to power of Reagan, the American ruling class initiated a social counterrevolution, steadily rolling back these social gains, imposing mass layoffs, beginning with the firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers, and funneling ever-greater wealth to the corporate-financial oligarchy. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, these processes accelerated, as the War on Terror and decades of unending war required the diversion of ever-greater resources to the military.
Upon the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s once preeminent health agencies were totally unprepared and easily subordinated to the pro-capitalist policies of first the Trump and then the Biden administrations. Outside of Operation Warp Speed and the rapid production of vaccines, the heads of the CDC, NIH and other agencies collaborated in the bipartisan war on public health, which helped set the stage for the return of Trump.
But the unfolding war on science and public health under the new Trump administration marks a qualitative turning point in this process. All scientific agencies and academic institutions are in a state of free fall, from which they will not recover under capitalism. Already, a reverse “brain drain” is underway. A recent Nature poll found that fully 75 percent of scientists in the US are now considering leaving the country, with most eyeing Europe and Canada for relocation.
Opposition is building among scientists, as part of a growing radicalization of the American and international working class in response to the threat of fascism. An Open Letter written “To the American People” which condemns Trump’s “wholesale assault on U.S. science” has now been signed by over 2,000 elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
The defense of science and public health cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, which has fully enabled Trump’s consolidation of a fascist government and facilitated the terrorizing of students on college campuses. It was Biden and the Democrats who fully implemented Trump’s “herd immunity” policy of mass COVID-19 infection and death, while orchestrating the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and the ruthless crackdown on student protesters.
As with the fight to defend democratic rights and oppose war and genocide, the struggle for science and public health will only develop through the building of a socialist movement in the working class, the great progressive social force under capitalism. The Socialist Equality Party is leading this struggle, and we urge all those seeking to oppose Trump’s building of a fascist dictatorship to join our ranks today.