Trump’s cruel account account on public health is to reduce the lifestyle for the most vulnerable

On March 25, Andrew Nixon, Director of Communications for Health and Humanitarian Services, He said “The Covid-19 pandemic has ended, and HHS will not be lost billions of taxpayers that respond to a vase that does not exist that the Americans have moved years ago.”

This is not an illustration of politics. It is betrayal wrapped in a rotation.

While the White House justifies its $ 11.4 billion in public health funds by declaring the epidemic “End”, the truth – buried under the speech – is that these money was never about Covid. These money was the only important investment in behavioral health infrastructure in one generation, as unreasonable mental health services targeted depth and drug use services long before the virus.

According to 2025 Report justification for Congress SamsaA lot of funded funding:

• 988 suicide bomber and crises artery
• Granting the response to the country and the opioid tribal to treat the excess dose and reduce damage
• Behavioral health programs that serve children, gay sex+ youth, and rural societies
• Community mental health systems and workforce development initiatives

These were not “emergency pandemic tools”. Life is a fragile but vital safety network for societies destroyed by opioids, shocks, suicide and structural neglect. To erase this with one sentence, not only honest. It is inhuman.

But Clawbacks was only the beginning. Just two days later, on March 27, HHS Robert F. Kennedy Junior. I command The demobilization of workers consisting of 10,000 federal health workers, which reduces the agency’s workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to “simplify” federal health authorities. Among the workers specializing in mother health, food safety and prevention of infectious diseases, as well as the entire audit units within the Food and Drug Administration. The plan will also unify 28 parts of HHS divisions in only 15, including creating a new group of ideology: Management for the sake of sound America, which is a center for “Make America Healthy again” from Kennedy, focused on chronic diseases instead of fair public health.

This is not a policy axis. It is a typical transformation-which publicly seeks to create and remove public health systems, while reformulating chronic disease as an ethical crisis and individual failure.

Language of erasure and great urgency of weakness

Covid calling “unlike” is more than a mistake-it illuminates a national scale. As of March 2025, CDC still reports Hundreds of deaths associated with COVID per week, with the long length disabled up to 15 % of the injured-including adults of working age.

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The HHS statement is a rhetorical camouflage, designed to ignite fatigue and resentment among voters who want to “move forward”. But what is required to move from it is to reach the mental health of their children, the treatment of saving life for addiction to opioids, and the prevention of suicide for young LGBTQ+.

Among the first losses in the federal Clawback, including HIV awareness and preparatory promotion; Information to mislead the vaccine and public health communications research; Behavioral health programs targeting the black population and the indigenous population and LGBTQ+; Crisis response services in tribal, rural and low -income societies.

This is not financial discipline. The abandonment of those less can be recovered without support.

Wrong mathematics for the Fintanel axis

To justify this comprehensive allocation, the administration called for a new economic appreciation: 2.7 trillion dollars in annual costs From the illegal fentanel. While the crisis of an overdose of opioid materials is real and tragic, the mathematics used here are economically and comfortable politically, first using an enlarged assessment of death.

The estimate applies 13 million dollars The value of statistical life (VSL) for every overnight dose, derived from the NIH No. 2017 enlargement. While VSL is legitimate for organizational analysis, its application uniformly to excessive deaths from an overdose without looking at age, social and economic situation or work provides systematic bias.

It also uses stacked categories and double counting. Specifically, an estimate of $ 2.7 trillion includes $ 1.1 trillion for lost life; $ 1.34 trillion to reduce the quality of life; And $ 277 billion in health care, productivity and criminal justice costs.

This triple waiver occurs when the same losses-such as missed wages, hospital and suffering bills-are priced several times under various signs. Both VSL and Qaly (average -quality life year) already include productivity and economic health care. Adding these again under a separate title leads to an amplification of the total Beyond economists in public health Or agencies such as the Center for Disease Control will compare.

What is the likely real cost

If we correct the overlap and the application of conservative VL Values ​​or the Qali -based models, then most of the studies reviewed by peers estimated the true economic burden of opioid materials in the range of $ 500 billion to 800 billion dollars annually, and not 2.7 trillion dollars. This is still destroyed-but also reveals that the number of management is higher than 3 to 5 times of best practices, and a rhetoric of public health programs that have nothing to do with Avions.

After these wrong equations, the administration then compares the losses of opioid materials by withdrawing the gross domestic product by 0.4 % of the definitions, which means that the first is categorically worse. But this is economic lightness: definitions affect the flow of macroeconomic trade, while the costs of opioids are the partial economy and most of them are internal losses-these are not comparable categories.

Exploiting another burial crisis

There is no doubt that the fentanel crisis is urgent. But the administration’s decision to dismantle the Kovid era programs-which recently started providing a real infrastructure for behavioral health-means that they choose Peter to pay Paul.

Instead of expanding a set of tools, they ignore some of the only tools that work for the deprived population.

A legal and political reaction forward?

This step is unlikely without challenge. Legal experts suggest that civil rights groups can be argued in violations of Chapter VI due to the different effect on LGBTQ+ groups and colored people. The state prosecutors may also submit claims under the Administrative Procedures Law if operations that end from grants occur without setting required rules and stipulates that the money committed on multiple years of years can Soo to violate the accreditation Or grant assurances.

On April 1, 2025, 25 states and province of Colombia Federal lawsuit filed Against HHS and Minister Robert F. Kennedy Junior at the US boycott court of Rod Island, seeking to prevent $ 11 billion in public health funds. The lawsuit challenges that the ends under the Administrative Procedures Law require the judicial relief of emergency. Although it is a decisive step forward, the complaint has lost opportunities to include a different impact demand in the sixth address and Ada, which can form a basis for civil rights intervention in the future, and advertisements of doctors, youth, tribal leaders and social workers who can have to harm to support the restless relief. These negligence does not reduce the value of the case – but it leaves room for others to build on what started

Poastery is not the element of the Kofid line

These cuts and attacks on public health are not about holding the bureaucratic books. It relates to her life enough to finance. The administration has chosen a satirical path: taking advantage of the epidemic fatigue to erase programs that have recently begun to retract contracts for neglecting public health. The recall of this “recovery” is an insult to every society that still grieves, struggles or dies due to lack of care.

This was not just the money of Kovid – it was hope. This policy kills it.