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Every day, they tackled complex issues with the interests of life and death:
Donor organs could not be ingested in critically ill patients.
A tobacco product designed to appeal to children.
Death of mothers and infants.
They were hired after lawmakers and bureaucrats discussed, negotiated, and persuaded colleagues to do someone’s job to settle their colleagues (sometimes for years).
Then, this month they were fired as part of President Donald Trump’s extensive cleansing of federal workers. Suddenly, the future of their public health missions was becoming a problem.
What we see
During Donald Trump’s second presidency, Propovica will focus on areas that need scrutiny. Below are some of the issues reporters watch, and how to safely communicate with them.
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The White House has not released figures as to how many people were fired, but news reports have begun stocking it. Approximately 750 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention play a central role in responding to the pandemic. Over 1,000 staff from the National Institutes of Health fund and conduct life-saving research. dozens of people from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages public health and insurance programs. Scores for Food, Drug Administration employees who oversee the safety of food, drugs and medical devices.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the FDA needs to be cut “all departments” and vowed to destroy federal health centers. Neither the administration nor federal agencies answered Propublica’s questions, but a White House spokesperson previously said they were eliminating new employees “not mission-critical.”
“The impact on the health of our people is significant,” says Susan Polan, Associate Executive Director of the Federal Public Health Association, suing the government’s efficiency office, which leads the shooting for violating federal transparency laws. . “These cuts are worth it and it’s immeasurable that no one can imagine them doing anything other than performance.”
Propublica reporters spoke with dozens of federal workers employed in the role of protecting Americans from harm. They explained that they lose important positions they had trained for years. Many expressed fear about what would happen to the work they left behind.
Propublica has recorded purge casualties, and the scale of what is lost as public health programs and veteran experts are caught up in the Trump administration’s blunt forces’ willingness to reduce the federal government. It emphasizes.
Protect your child from cigarettes
Dustin Brace Credit: Courtesy Dustin Brace
For over a decade, Dustin Brace has worked in a variety of federal governments, dealing with major chemical and oil spills as a Navy Emergency 911 Dispatcher and as a member of the Coast Guard. “I loved working to protect Americans,” he said. “I didn’t think I was leaving the government.”
When he joined the FDA last year, his mission was the same. As a social scientist at the agency’s Tobacco Products Center, he helped regulate e-cigarettes and related items. Some were designed to look like food for kids. It resembles a can of grape soda, or decorated with cartoons like a unicorn eating pancakes. In recent years, more young children have landed in emergency rooms and are poisoned by liquid nicotine. And sometimes the devices explode – in people’s pockets, hands, or faces. A man died after a sh shotgun entered his brain.
Each week, Brace scrutinized the applications of new products to ensure that the device was safe for consumer use, not appealing to children. This task required a close and careful review of thousands of pages of documents and comb them in search of hidden dangers. “It takes time for the job to be done properly,” he said.
His work, and the center as a whole, came from a bipartisan understanding that the tobacco industry needs to be regulated. It wasn’t until 2009 after decades of industry pushbacks that the FDA ultimately gained wide legal authority to do so.
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The agency has historically struggled to recruit enough scientists and experts to receive higher salaries in the private sector. “People don’t come for agents like the FDA or for centres like CTP,” said Mitch Zeller, director of the centre from 2013 to 2022.
In particular, the Center’s regulatory activities are funded through tobacco industry costs and do not rely on direct federal support. “No one taxpayer dollar is being spent regulating the tobacco industry,” Zeller said.
Last Saturday, Brace received a layoff notice along with other new employees on his team. Like those sent to other federal workers, his assessment records show that despite the fact that Brace has received positive reviews over the past year, he cites a decline in performance. .
Brace estimated that over 10% of the center’s science department staff had finished last week.
“Things will be slower,” Brace said. “Because the workload is so high, there can be more mistakes.”
Prevent mothers and babies from dying
Ariel Kane Credit: Courtesy Ariel Kane
The mission told her last year when Ariel Kane joined a team working on innovative federal programs to make births safer in the United States.
She was able to save her life.
The United States has the worst mortality rates among high-income countries for pregnant and postpartum women, and people in underserved communities face some of the best risks. If the mother does not have access to prenatal care or lives in a so-called “maternal desert” where obstetric care is unavailable or limited, the baby is at risk if it is seen promptly due to complications You are exposed.
Kane’s program under the CMS was created to support Medicaid mothers. Increase access to birth centers, doulas and midwives, reduce dangerous procedures such as C-sections, and track outcomes such as birth weight for low infants. Improved blood pressure monitoring can prevent life-threatening complications such as pre-lamps. Special attention to depression and substance use can have equally devastating consequences.
It officially launched on January 1st, and Kane was excited by the possibility.
However, after Trump took office, they were instructed to halt data collection on race and ethnicity, many of which were plagued. Racial disparities are prevalent in maternal health. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, and more than twice as likely to suffer stillbirth. Kane also said she was told not to communicate with state authorities or attend future meetings on mothers’ health.
Then, just a month and a half after the launch, Kane and three colleagues were fired. She said the team will be cut in almost half as the other two plan to leave at the end of the month.
“I’m very angry,” Kane said. “This model, which has many possibilities, is just hampered. What does that mean for all the potential impacts we may have?”
Donor organs do not get lost
Amy Paris Credit: Courtesy Amy Paris
For over a decade, Amy Paris worked as a problem solver for federal agencies. It modifies an overly bureaucratic and tedious process to make it easier for the public to navigate.
Last year she was hired to help reform the country’s organ procurement and transplant network, a public-private partnership that connects patients with organ donors with critical needs for transplantation.
The program had recently fired fire. Thousands of patients were almost dying on the waiting list, so some donor organs were not even used. Multiple kidneys had to be thrown away due to delayed transport. The courier has not picked up the item in time, or the airline has mistakenly placed it. One was accidentally left in the airport luggage trolley.
After a federal and Senate investigation, detailed many failures, including archaic information technology systems, the Department of Health Resources and Services announced its modernization initiative in March 2023.
Paris joined the team last October as a lead in Associate Digital Services, working with transplant surgeons, technology experts and data scientists to upgrade. “We were moving forward,” she said. “We were working with Democrats and Republicans on the hills. We had the funds and they employed us more.”
We did because Texas doesn’t study how abortion bans affect women
As a new employee, she considered her to be one of the first people to go to purge federal workers. Still, she was devastated when she received the notice.
About half of her team was fired, she said, which brings reform efforts back indefinitely. After her firing, she had to cancel a planned trip to investigate the underlying technology of the network system.
“We are screaming for the government in ways that will hurt people and kill people,” she said. “That’s the most frightening thing in the world.”
