CDC officials plan for the agency's splintering, but questions remain

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CDC officials plan for the agency's splintering, but questions remain

2025-04-11 02:34 Last Updated At：02:51

NEW YORK (AP) — A top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official told staff this week to start planning for the agency's splintering.

Several parts of CDC — mostly those devoted to health threats that aren't infectious — are being spun off into the soon-to-be-created Administration for a Healthy America, the agency official told senior leaders in calls and meetings.

The directive came from Dr. Debra Houry, the agency’s chief medical officer, according to three CDC officials who were in attendance. They declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to talk about the plans and fear being fired if they were identified.

Asked to comment, Houry referred The Associated Press to CDC media relations representatives. CDC spokesperson Jason McDonald acknowledged the agency is planning for possible changes but that "none of the items discussed at the meeting have been finalized, and are subject to change.”

Dr. Scott Harris, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said there are “a lot more questions than there are answers right now.”

Those questions include whether the split will interrupt funding and assistance to state health departments that ultimately implement federal health policy, said Harris, who also is Alabama's state health officer.

“We'd love to be able to give input,” he said.

The Atlanta-based CDC is charged with protecting Americans from preventable health threats. It had roughly 13,000 employees at the beginning of the year, the bulk of them in Georgia.

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has embarked on a dramatic downsizing of many federal agencies. The CDC's headcount was slashed by rounds of early retirements and layoffs that reduced staffing by 3,500 to 4,000 employees.

The layoffs targeted not just job classifications but offices and programs. For example, everyone at the CDC’s division on dental health was axed, as were most workers at an office that investigates occupational diseases and promotes job safety.

Now, federal health officials are deciding how to reassemble what's left. They have a Monday deadline to submit a reorganization plan to the White House.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already outlined plans for the new Administration for a Healthy America, which would largely focus on health problems not caused by infections.

“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said in a statement last month.

Kennedy has said the AHA will contain — among other things — the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the U.S. Surgeon General.

In the meetings this week, Houry said the new AHA agency also will likely absorb what’s left of the CDC centers devoted to birth defects, chronic conditions, environmental health, injuries, and workplace safety.

It's not clear if those staffers would stay in Atlanta — and that “deeply matters,” said Jason Schwartz, a Yale University health policy researcher who studies government health agencies.

If those jobs are moved to the Washington, D.C., area, "you certainly are going to lose lots of the kinds of experts who have built lives and careers and families in and around Atlanta, many of whom I'm sure would be unable or unwilling to relocate their lives," he said.

That would likely mean “you are building something anew, rather than just changing reporting lines,” he said.

The parts of CDC not being moved into the AHA would be be mainly focused on infectious diseases, with one notable exception: HIV.

The CDC's HIV prevention staff was decimated in the layoffs, with 160 people eliminated. What's left — the agency's HIV surveillance and lab operations, for example — would shift to the AHA under the realignment plan.

Such a change would place that CDC work under the same organizational umbrella as HRSA's Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. That program provides outpatient care, treatment and support services to people with HIV but no health insurance.

A cleaving of the CDC was proposed in Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation government-shrinking proposal that surfaced last year. That document called the CDC “the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government” and proposed splitting it into two smaller agencies — one focused on disease data collection and the other more generally on public health.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

US Forest Service starts clearing homeless camp in Oregon national forest

2025-05-02 07:15 Last Updated At：07:21

BEND, Ore. (AP) — Dozens of homeless people who have been living in a national forest in central Oregon for years were being evicted Thursday by the U.S. Forest Service, as it closed the area for a wildfire prevention project that will involve removing smaller trees, clearing debris and setting controlled burns over thousands of acres.

The project has been on the books for years, and the decision to remove the encampment in the Deschutes National Forest comes two months after the Trump administration issued an executive order directing federal agencies to increase timber production and forest management projects aimed at reducing wildfire risk.

Deschutes National Forest spokesperson Kaitlyn Webb said in an email that the closure order was “directly tied to the forest restoration work.” Homeless advocates, however, seized on the timing on Thursday as U.S. Forest Service officers blocked the access road.

“The fact that they are doing this with such vigor shortly after they announced that the forests would be opened up for logging I don’t think is a coincidence," said Jesse Rabinowitz, spokesperson for the National Homelessness Law Center.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and the service’s Pacific Northwest Region did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

“The closure does not target any specific user group and will restrict all access, including day use and overnight camping, while crews operate heavy machinery, conduct prescribed burns, and clean up hazardous materials,” Webb said. “It’s not safe for the public to be in the area while heavy machinery is operating, trees are being felled, mowing operations are active, and prescribed burning is occurring.”

Campers who had set up trailers, recreational vehicles and tents amidst the ponderosa pines in the forest scrambled in the darkness Wednesday night to pack up and get their engines working again. Authorities closed the two-lane road in the early hours of Thursday morning, and it wasn’t immediately clear how many people were left in the forest by the afternoon, though some were unable to leave.

The U.S. Forest Service has been working for years on plans to close part of the Deschutes National Forest near Bend for forest restoration and wildfire mitigation. But the number of people living in that part of the forest has grown, with many losing homes during the coronavirus pandemic due to job losses and high housing costs, Rabinowitz said.

President Donald Trump’s administration has acted to roll back environmental safeguards around future logging projects on more than half of U.S. national forests, under an emergency designation that cites dangers from wildfires.

Whether the administration's move will boost lumber supplies as Trump envisioned in an executive order he signed in March remains to be seen. Former President Joe Biden’s administration also sought more logging in public forests to combat fires, which have become more intense amid drier and hotter conditions linked to climate change, yet U.S. Forest Service timber sales stayed relatively flat under his tenure.

The Cabin Butte Vegetation Management Project, a wildfire mitigation treatment on some 30,000 acres (12,000 hectares), is prompting the closures in the Deschutes National Forest.

The goal of the work is to reduce wildfire risk and restore damaged habitats where development encroaches on natural areas near Bend, Deschutes National Forest officials said in a statement. Recreation sites and trails in that area will be closed through April next year.

Multiple U.S. Forest Service officials and vehicles were stationed at the Deschutes National Forest road closure on Thursday. A sign on the metal gate blocking the road said the temporary emergency closure will last at least one year.

Violators could face up to six months in jail, fines up to $5,000, or both.

On Wednesday night, Mandy Bryant, who said she had lived in the encampment for about three years, was cleaning up her site and trying to get a trailer to start so she could move it.

“You could feel the heaviness in the air and just the stress and depression that people are feeling,” she told The Associated Press. “We’re up there on the list of groups of people that society doesn’t really care for.”

Four people living in the encampment including Bryant, along with two homeless advocates, filed for a restraining order to stop the closure. The claim argued it would cause irreparable harm to more than 100 people who were living there, many of whom have disabilities.

The government responded in court filings that U.S. Forest Service staff in January began notifying homeless people living in the area of the upcoming closure. Original plans for the project were published in 2019 and were authorized by the U.S. Forest Service in 2023, the court filings said.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane denied the restraining order on Tuesday and issued a written opinion on Thursday.

“The public’s significant interest in restoring natural habitats, preventing catastrophic wildfires, and preserving the overall health of Deschutes National Forest is not outweighed by the interest of 150 or so individuals in residing on this particular plot of land," he wrote in his ruling.

Webb, the Deschutes National Forest spokesperson, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the government’s goal is “voluntary compliance,” but Forest Service officers and staff will patrol and “enforce the closure and ensure public safety.”

Rush reported from Portland, Oregon.