Tag Archives: United States Department of Health and Human Services

Home & Kitchen

FDA food inspector vacancies near 20% after Trump hiring freeze

Nearly 1 in 5 positions across the Food and Drug Administration’s human food inspection divisions are now vacant, multiple agency officials tell CBS News, in the wake of departures encouraged by the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts and a government-wide hiring freeze that had stalled efforts to replenish their ranks.

While the FDA has long struggled with hiring and retaining qualified investigators to inspect food producers and distributors, multiple federal health officials — who spoke on the condition of anonymity and were not authorized to speak to the press — say that the staffing gap has worsened due to early retirements and resignations.

“The FDA remains fully capable of fulfilling its public health mission to protect the safety of the American people. Under Commissioner Makary’s leadership, the agency continues to meet its inspection obligations, ensuring that all facilities are reviewed within mandated timeframes,” Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told CBS News.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has claimed in interviews that no inspectors were laid off at the agency as a result of the sweeping restructuring ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that began in April, but has not acknowledged the retirements and resignations.

And despite Makary’s statements, multiple FDA officials said they are worried about worsening attrition in the agency’s ranks of investigators. 

“They’re not going to admit our mission is at risk and we’re missing timeframes, even though I’ve heard that’s happening,” a current FDA official told CBS News in a message. 

A separate current FDA official and one former official said that close to 20% of investigational positions are vacant across the agency’s human foods inspectorate. 

“Since 2017, our ability to fulfill its public health mission is increasingly constrained by reduced inspectional capacity. We continue to face significant obstacles in recruiting and retaining qualified investigators, particularly in the foods program, where nearly 90 investigative positions remain vacant,” the agency said last month in response to a draft of a report by the HHS inspector general. 

The inspector general had concluded that the FDA would need to increase inspections by more than 3,000 each year, in order to meet its goals. Under requirements laid out by Congress, the FDA is required to inspect food facilities at specific intervals, benchmarks that government watchdogs have long faulted the agency for falling short of.

“For FDA to meet the inspection timeframes moving forward, it would need to inspect approximately 7,000 high-risk facilities each year. However, FDA inspected only about 58 percent of that amount,” the inspector general’s June 2025 report said.

Around 40% of investigator positions are vacant for the group of investigators tasked with inspecting “critical foods” like infant formula plants, a current official said.

“Critical foods has had difficulty with staffing because every inspection is high profile and the team is traveling more often than not. It isn’t sustainable for everyone,” a former FDA official said.

The job of an FDA investigator has gotten harder in recent months, as the Trump administration imposed additional hurdles to make small purchases necessary for their work, ranging from buying everyday supplies to shipping samples, officials said.

“The reality is that the extra steps in budget approval processes have caused inspections to be delayed, and investigators have had to take on administrative tasks that eat into their time being productive. Everything was taking longer,” the former FDA official said.

Many administrative staff and laboratory scientists supporting the FDA’s food inspectors were also eliminated through layoffs, resulting in backlogs of testing and reimbursements. Some have since been reinstated by the agency.

One current and one former FDA official said the agency also had many investigators that were in the process of being hired months ago, before attempts to fill the slots were blocked by an order signed by President Trump that now extends through July 15. 

Multiple officials said Friday morning they were hopeful that the Trump administration might grant an exemption to the hiring freeze after weeks of lobbying by officials within the agency.

On Friday afternoon, after HHS responded to a CBS News request for comment about this story, the FDA published its first new hiring announcement for food investigators in months, among a handful of new job postings.

“This position is being filled under a stream-lined hiring authority,” the job posting reads.

Alexander Tin

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

Asthma sufferers could be at greater risk if Trump cuts health program

Esther Bejarano’s son was 11 months old when asthma landed him in the hospital. She didn’t know what had triggered his symptoms — neither she nor her husband had asthma — but she suspected it was the pesticides sprayed on the agricultural fields near her family’s home.

Pesticides are a known contributor to asthma and are commonly used where Bejarano lives in California’s Imperial Valley, a landlocked region that straddles two counties on the U.S.-Mexico border and is one of the main producers of the nation’s winter crops. It also has some of the worst air pollution in the nation and one of the highest rates of childhood asthma emergency room visits in the state, according to data collected by the California Department of Public Health.

Bejarano has since learned to manage her now-19-year-old son’s asthma and works at Comite Civico del Valle, a local rights organization focused on environmental justice in the Imperial Valley. The organization trains health care workers to educate patients on proper asthma management, enabling them to avoid hospitalization and eliminate triggers at home. The course is so popular that there’s a waiting list, Bejarano said.

But the group’s Asthma Management Academy program and similar initiatives nationwide face extinction with the Trump administration’s mass layoffs, grant cancellations, and proposed budget cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. Asthma experts fear the cumulative impact of the reductions could result in more ER visits and deaths, particularly for children and people in low-income communities — populations disproportionately vulnerable to the disease.

“Asthma is a preventive condition,” Bejarano said. “No one should die of asthma.”

Asthma can block airways, making it hard to breathe, and in severe cases can cause death if not treated quickly. Nearly 28 million people in the U.S. have asthma, and about 10 people still die every day from the disease, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

In May, the White House released a budget proposal that would permanently shutter the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Asthma Control Program, which was already gutted by federal health department layoffs in April. It’s unclear whether Congress will approve the closure.

Last year, the program allotted $33.5 million to state-administered initiatives in 27 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., to help communities with asthma education. The funding is distributed in four-year grant cycles, during which the programs receive up to $725,000 each annually.

Comite Civico del Valle’s academy in Southern California, a clinician workshop in Houston, and asthma medical management training in Allentown, Pennsylvania — ranked the most challenging U.S. city to live in with asthma — are among the programs largely surviving on these grants. The first year of the current grant cycle ends Aug. 31, and it’s unknown whether funding will continue beyond then. 

Data suggests that the CDC’s National Asthma Control Program has had a significant impact. The agency’s own research has shown that the program saves $71 in health care costs for every $1 invested. And the asthma death rate decreased 44% between the 1999 launch of the program and 2021, according to the American Lung Association.

“Losing support from the CDC will have devastating impacts on asthma programs in states and communities across the country, programs that we know are improving the lives of millions of people with asthma,” said Anne Kelsey Lamb, director of the Public Health Institute’s Regional Asthma Management and Prevention program. “And the thing is that we know a lot about what works to help people keep their asthma well controlled, and that’s why it’s so devastating.”

The Trump administration cited cost savings and efficiency in its April announcement of the cuts to HHS. Requests for comment from the White House and HHS’s CDC about cuts to federal asthma and related programs were not answered.

The information wars

Fresno, in the heart of California’s Central Valley, is one of the country’s top 20 “asthma capitals,” with high rates of asthma and related emergencies and deaths. It’s home to programs that receive funding through the National Asthma Control Program. Health care professionals there also rely on another aspect of the program that is under threat if it’s shuttered: countrywide data.

The federal asthma program collects information on asthma rates and offers a tool to study prevalence and rates of death from the disease, see what populations are most affected, and assess state and local trends. Asthma educators and health care providers worry that the loss of these numbers could be the biggest impact of the cuts, because it would mean a dearth of information crucial to forming educated recommendations and treatment plans.

“How do we justify the services we provide if the data isn’t there?” said Graciela Anaya, director of community health at the Central California Asthma Collaborative in Fresno.

Mitchell Grayson, chair of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation’s Medical Scientific Council, is similarly concerned.

“My fear is we’re going to live in a world that is frozen in Jan. 19, 2025, as far as data, because that was the last time you know that this information was safely collected,” he said.

Grayson, an allergist who practices in Columbus, Ohio, said he also worries government websites will delete important recommendations that asthma sufferers avoid heavy air pollution, get annual flu shots, and get COVID-19 vaccines.

Disproportionate risk

Asthma disproportionately affects communities of color because of “historic structural issues,” said Lynda Mitchell, CEO of the Asthma and Allergy Network, citing a higher likelihood of living in public housing or near highways and other pollution sources.

She and other experts in the field said cuts to diversity initiatives across federal agencies, combined with the rollback of environmental protections, will have an outsize impact on these at-risk populations.

In December, the Biden administration awarded nearly $1.6 billion through the EPA’s Community Change Grants program to help disadvantaged communities address pollution and climate threats. The Trump administration moved to cut this funding in March. The grant freezes, which have been temporarily blocked by the courts, are part of a broader effort by the Trump EPA to eliminate aid to environmental justice programs across the agency.

In 2023 and 2024, the National Institutes of Health’s Climate Change and Health Initiative received $40 million for research, including on the link between asthma and climate change. The Trump administration has moved to cut that money. And a March memo essentially halted all NIH grants focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI — funds many of the asthma programs serving low-income communities rely on to operate.

On top of those cuts, environmental advocates like Isabel González Whitaker of Memphis, Tennessee, worry that the proposed reversals of environmental regulations will further harm the health of communities like hers that are already reeling from the effects of climate change. Shelby County, home to Memphis, recently received an F on the American Lung Association’s annual report card for having so many high ozone days. González Whitaker is director of EcoMadres, a program within the national organization Moms for Clean Air that advocates for better environmental conditions for Latino communities.

“Urgent asthma needs in communities are getting defunded at a time when I just see things getting worse in terms of deregulation,” said González Whitaker, who took her 12-year-old son to the hospital because of breathing issues for the first time this year. “We’re being assaulted by this data and science, which is clearly stating that we need to be doing better around preserving the regulations.”

Back in California’s Imperial Valley — where the majority-Hispanic, working-class population surrounds California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea — is an area called Bombay Beach. Bejarano calls it the “forgotten community.” Homes there lack clean running water, because of naturally occurring arsenic in the groundwater, and residents frequently experience a smell like rotten eggs blowing off the drying lakebed, exposing decades of pesticide-tinged dirt.

In 2022, a 12-year-old girl died in Bombay Beach after an asthma attack. Bejarano said she later learned that the girl’s school had recommended that she take part in Comite Civico del Valle’s at-home asthma education program. She said the girl was on the waiting list when she died.

“It hit home. Her death showed the personal need we have here in Imperial County,” Bejarano said. “Deaths are preventable. Asthma is reversible. If you have asthma, you should be able to live a healthy life.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

RFK Jr. is struggling to keep his promise to protect Native Americans from health cuts

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. — Navajo Nation leaders took turns talking with the U.S. government’s top health official as they hiked along a sandstone ridge overlooking their rural, high-desert town before the morning sun grew too hot.

Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, paused at the edge with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Below them, tribal government buildings, homes, and juniper trees dotted the tan and deep-red landscape.

Nygren said he wanted Kennedy to look at the capital for the nation of about 400,000 enrolled members. The tribal president pointed toward an antiquated health center that he hoped federal funding would help replace and described life for the thousands of locals without running water due to delayed government projects.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren talk on the edge of a ridge in Window Rock, Arizona, about the nation’s list of health priorities.

Katheryn Houghton/KFF Health News


Nygren said Kennedy had already done a lot, primarily saving the Indian Health Service from a round of staffing cuts rippling through the federal government.

“When we started hearing about the layoffs and the freezes, you were the first one to stand up for Indian Country,” he told Kennedy, of his move to spare the federal agency charged with providing health care to Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

But Nygren and other Navajo leaders said cuts to federal health programs outside the Indian Health Service are hurting Native Americans.

“You’re disrupting real lives,” Cherilyn Yazzie, a Navajo council delegate, told KFF Health News as she described recent changes.

Kennedy has repeatedly promised to prioritize Native Americans’ health care. But Native Americans and health officials across tribal nations say those overtures are overshadowed by the collateral harm from massive cuts to federal health programs.

The sweeping reductions have resulted in cuts to funding directed toward or disproportionately relied on by Native Americans. Staffing cuts, tribal health leaders say, have led to missing data and poor communication.

The Indian Health Service provides free health care at its hospitals and clinics to Native Americans, who, as a group, face higher rates of chronic diseases and die younger than other populations. Those inequities are attributable to centuries of systemic discrimination. But many tribal members don’t live near an agency clinic or hospital. And those who do may face limited services, chronic underfunding, and staffing shortages. To work around those gaps, health organizations lean on other federally funded programs.

“There may be a misconception among some of the administration that Indian Country is only impacted by changes to the Indian Health Service,” said Liz Malerba, a tribal policy expert and citizen of the Mohegan Tribe. “That’s simply not true.”

Tribes have lost more than $6 million in grants from other HHS agencies, the National Indian Health Board wrote in a May letter to Kennedy.

Janet Alkire, chairperson of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the Dakotas, said at a May 14 Senate committee hearing that those grants paid for community health workers, vaccinations, data modernization, and other public health efforts.

The government also canceled funding for programs it said violated President Trump’s ban on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” including one aimed at Native American youth interested in science and medicine and another that helps several tribes increase access to healthy food — something Kennedy has said he wants to prioritize.

Tribal health officials say slashed federal staffing has made it harder to get technical support and money for federally funded health projects they run.

The firings have cut or eliminated staff at programs related to preventing overdoses in tribal communities, using traditional food and medicine to fight chronic disease, and helping low-income people afford to heat and cool their homes through the Low Income Home Energy Program.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe is in South Dakota, where Native Americans who struggle to heat their homes have died of hypothermia. Through mid-May the tribe hadn’t been able to access its latest funding installment from the energy program, said John Long, the tribe’s chief of staff.

Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute at the Seattle Indian Health Board, said the government has sent her organization incomplete health data. That includes statistics about Native Americans at risk for suicide and substance use disorders, which the center uses to shape public health policy and programs.

“People are going to die because we don’t have access to the data,” Echo-Hawk said.

Her organization is also having trouble administering a $2.2 million federal grant, she said, because the agency handling the money fired staffers she worked with. The grant pays for public health initiatives such as smoking cessation and vaccinations.

“It is very confusing to say chronic disease prevention is the No. 1 priority and then to eradicate the support needed to address chronic disease prevention in Indian Country,” Echo-Hawk said.

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said Kennedy aims to combat chronic diseases and improve well-being among Native Americans “through culturally relevant, community-driven solutions.”

Hilliard did not respond to questions about Kennedy’s specific plans for Native American health or concerns about existing and proposed funding and staffing changes.

As Kennedy hiked alongside Navajo Nation leaders, KFF Health News asked how he would improve and protect access to care for tribal communities amid rollbacks within his department.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Kennedy responded. “Making sure that all the cuts do not affect these communities.”

Kennedy has said his focus on Native American health stems from personal and family experience, something he repeated to Navajo leadership. As an attorney, he worked with tribes on environmental health lawsuits. He also served as an editor at ICT, a major Native American news outlet.

The secretary said he was also influenced by his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and his father, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who were both assassinated when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a child.

“They thought that America would never live up to its moral authority and its role as an exemplary nation around the world if we didn’t first look back and remediate or mitigate the original sin of the American experience — the genocide of the Native people,” Kennedy said during his visit.

Some tribal leaders say the recent cuts, and the way the administration made them, violate treaties in which the U.S. promised to provide for the health and welfare of tribes in return for taking their land.

“We have not been consulted with meaningfully on any of these actions,” said Malerba, director of policy and legislative affairs for the United South and Eastern Tribes Sovereignty Protection Fund, which advocates for tribes from Texas to Maine.

Alkire said at the congressional hearing that many Native American health organizations sent letters to the health department asking for consultations but none has received a response.

Tribal consultation is legally required when federal agencies pursue changes that would have a significant impact on tribal nations.

“This is not just a moral question of what we owe Native people,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said at the hearing. “It is also a question of the law.”

Tribal leaders are worried about additional proposed changes, including funding cuts to the Indian Health Service and a reorganization of the federal health department.

Esther Lucero, president and CEO of the Seattle Indian Health Board, said the maneuvers remind her of the level of daily uncertainty she felt working through the COVID-19 pandemic — only with fewer resources.

“Our ability to serve those who are desperately in need feels at risk,” Lucero said.

Among the most pressing concerns are congressional Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, the primary government health insurance program for people with low incomes or disabilities.

About 30% of Native American and Alaska Native people younger than 65 are enrolled in Medicaid, and the program helps keep Indian Health Service and other tribal health facilities afloat.

Native American adults would be exempt from Medicaid work requirements approved by House Republicans on May 21. 

After Kennedy summited Window Rock with Navajo Nation leaders, the tribe held a prayer ceremony in which they blessed him in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language. President Nygren stressed how meaningful it was for the country’s health secretary to walk alongside them. He also reminded Kennedy of the list of priorities they’d discussed. That included maintaining the federal low-income energy assistance program.

“We look forward to reestablishing and protecting some of the services that your department provides,” Nygren said.

As of mid-May, the Trump administration had proposed eliminating the energy program, which remains unstaffed.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

Breaking down RFK Jr.’s announcement on COVID vaccine recommendations



Breaking down RFK Jr.’s announcement on COVID vaccine recommendations – CBS News










































Watch CBS News



Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he would remove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation for children and healthy pregnant women to get vaccinated for COVID-19. Weijia Jiang reports and Dr. Jon LaPook joins to explain more.

Be the first to know

Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.


Source link

Home & Kitchen

RFK Jr. says CDC will no longer recommend COVID vaccine for children and pregnant women

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he would remove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s recommendation for children and healthy pregnant women to get vaccinated for COVID-19.

“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said in a video attached to his post.

However, as of Tuesday morning, the CDC had so far not updated the immunization schedule to reflect the removal announced by Kennedy.

Kennedy’s move, announced Tuesday on X, appears to effectively shortcut a process set up by the agency’s outside advisers to discuss and make changes to the CDC’s influential vaccination guidance, which is directly tied to what insurers are required to cover and liability protections.

Those advisers had already been weighing whether and how to narrow the agency’s COVID-19 vaccine recommendations to only older adults and other people with an underlying condition that put them at risk of more severe illness from COVID-19. 

Kennedy’s announcement also goes further than the advisory panel, which had been weighing including pregnant women as among those who would remain eligible for COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, given their increased risk of severe disease and the fact that it could also help provide some protection to their newborns.

The move also puts Kennedy at odds with his new officials at the Food and Drug Administration, who recently said pregnancy was among the underlying conditions that warranted continued eligibility for COVID-19 vaccine approvals. 

It is not clear why Kennedy chose to announce the decision without waiting for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to complete its deliberations. The panel had been expected to vote on the issue at the routinely scheduled June meeting hosted by the agency.

“With the COVID-19 pandemic behind us, it is time to move forward. HHS and the CDC remain committed to gold standard science and to ensuring the health and well-being of all Americans — especially our nation’s children — using common sense,” Vianca N. Rodriguez Feliciano, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email.

Kennedy has also stalled other overdue recommendations from the panel for respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, vaccines and meningococcal vaccines. 

The committee had voted on updated recommendations for those vaccines in April. Usually it is up to the CDC director to approve the recommendations. But it has been up to Kennedy to decide whether to adopt the new guidance, since the Trump administration has not appointed an acting CDC director to replace Susan Monarez, who stepped aside from that role while she goes through the nomination process for CDC director.

Only one recommendation from the April meeting, an update to restrict use of a Chikungunya vaccine linked to potentially severe side effects, has been greenlighted by Kennedy.

HHS has not responded to requests for comment on why the other recommendations have been delayed. 

Alexander Tin

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

RFK Jr. tells farmers, GOP not to worry about his report targeting pesticides

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought Tuesday to reassure farmers and one Republican senator about his upcoming report on how pesticides are driving up rates of childhood chronic diseases, acknowledging that chemicals like glyphosate that he has long criticized are widely used for growing crops in the U.S.

“I have said repeatedly throughout this process, that we cannot take any step that will put a single farmer in this country out of business,” Kennedy said at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “There’s a million farmers who rely on glyphosate. 100% of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model.” 

The White House in February tasked Kennedy with leading a “Make America Healthy Again Commission,” which is producing a report assessing the threat of a range of issues that might be causing disease in children. 

Targets include the “potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures” in children. Kennedy said their report was due to be released Thursday. 

“Your information about the report is just simply wrong,” Kennedy told Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi in response to a question about the report. “The drafts that I’ve seen, there is not a single word in them that should worry the American farmer.” 

Hyde-Smith had told Kennedy that she was “deeply concerned” that the report will “unfairly target American agriculture, modern farming practices and the crop protection tools” that U.S. farmers use.

“We all know what confirmation bias is. It’s no secret that you were involved with pesticide litigation, prior to becoming secretary,” Hyde-Smith told Kennedy.

What has RFK Jr. said about pesticides like glyphosate?

Kennedy has criticized the use of several pesticides in the U.S. food supply, including as an environmental attorney during court battles with chemical manufacturer Monsanto over accusations that its widely-used weedkiller Roundup — made from the chemical glyphosate — was causing cancer.

“If my life were a Superman comic, Monsanto would be my Lex Luther. I’ve seen this company as the enemy of every admirable American value,” Kennedy wrote in a 2020 Facebook post.

During his longshot independent presidential campaign, Kennedy pledged to get toxins out of the food supply, warning that “toxic chemicals like glyphosate” were widely contaminating what Americans were eating. 

He continued that criticism in the months ahead of the 2024 election as he stumped in support of President Trump, recalling how his son resolved his “really agonizing” eczema by switching to eating pasta made in Europe.

“As soon as he comes back here and he eats the pasta in this country, he gets eczema,” he told Donald Trump Jr. on a podcast in September of last year. “And you know, they don’t have the glyphosate like we do, that is sprayed on the wheat at harvest time. So it’s going right into the food.” 

What will be in RFK Jr.’s “MAHA Commission” report?

One of Kennedy’s top HHS advisers, Calley Means — whose sister Dr. Casey Means was nominated by President Trump earlier this month for the surgeon general post — said that the report is aimed at outlining “obvious” ways that children are “being poisoned through areas that there’s not even that much scientific disagreement on.”

“Obviously, it’s because of environmental toxins,” Means said, speaking at a May 15 event hosted by the Kennedy-aligned MAHA Institute. “We produce and ingest 25% of the world’s pesticides. The leading herbicides and pesticides that we use in the United States, many of them are phased out or banned in every other country in the world.”

Means said that the report was not intended to result in “a European nanny state system” to crack down on pesticides, pledging instead to come up with “pro-innovation policies to solve this issue” under Kennedy. He blasted lobbyists for opposing the report’s release.

Beyond “environmental toxins” like pesticides, Means listed a number of other issues he alleges are making American children sick, including ultra-processed foods, added sugars, seed oils, sedentary behavior, lack of sleep, overprescriptions and vaccines.

“They’re saying it’s going to scare the American people to get facts out. They’re putting so much pressure on President Trump, so much pressure on Secretary Kennedy to not release facts,” Means said last week. 

What power does RFK Jr. have over pesticides?

The Department of Health and Human Services does not directly set the limits on how glyphosate and other pesticides are used. That is left up to the Environmental Protection Agency. However, HHS does oversee the major research that underpins how the EPA regulates chemicals.

Studies into pesticides like glyphosate to inform the EPA’s limits often come from the federal health agencies within HHS.

For example, the National Institutes of Health’s National Toxicology Program published results in 2023 suggesting that glyphosate is “unlikely” to be genotoxic, which had been one of the main ways international experts previously suspected it might cause cancer.

Results from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published in 2022 found that diet was likely a factor in how much glyphosate people were being exposed to, based on urine samples taken in adults and children. 

Through the Food and Drug Administration, Kennedy also has authority over how glyphosate levels in food are tracked and the EPA’s limits are enforced. 

The last round of published sampling by the FDA in 2022 found that 54 samples of human food had detectable amounts of glyphosate out of 731 analyzed. Corn and beans were among the most frequent detections.

Alexander Tin

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

Trump wants drug price caps tied to foreign nations. Here’s why Biden never did it.

Senate Democrats and the Biden administration dropped plans to set drug price caps based on the amount paid in other high-income countries, during talks years ago to push through the law that empowered Medicare to negotiate down the cost of prescription medications.

A version of the idea was revived by President Trump in the executive order signed Monday, which called on the Department of Health and Human Services next month to draw up regulations to impose price restrictions tied to lower amounts paid in other developed nations, if drugmakers did not voluntarily reduce what they were charging in the U.S. 

“Democrats could have done this a long time ago. They have fought like hell, for the drug companies. And they knew they were doing the wrong thing,” Mr. Trump told reporters, speaking at a White House event to announce the move. 

For Democrats on Capitol Hill, this kind of approach to price controls has roots in a bill their own party successfully passed under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2019. 

As part of giving Medicare the ability to negotiate the price of costly drugs it covered, the bill passed by House Democrats wanted the maximum price to be tied to an average based on prices paid in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. 

“We were hoping to get Trump. Trump said, ‘I want to negotiate.’ But then Republicans in Congress got to him,” said Wendell Primus, who served for nearly two decades as Pelosi’s top aide on health policy.

The bill did not make it through the Senate at the time, which was controlled by Mr. Trump’s party. After Democrats flipped control of the Senate, the idea ran into headwinds years later, as Biden aides and lawmakers tried to incorporate the measure into the Inflation Reduction Act.

Multiple Democrats involved in the talks on Capitol Hill at the time blamed a series of meetings in early 2021 with the staff from the Senate Finance Committee and party leadership for scuttling the idea. 

Staff on the committee said that they were worried that moderate Democrats like then-Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona would not support the bill if it included the measure, Primus said. Menendez and Sinema are no longer in the Senate. 

“Members did not want to have something referencing foreign countries. They wanted it to make a function of the manufacturer’s price here, what drug companies were offering to commercial insurers,” Primus said.

One former Biden White House aide involved in the talks said that there were several senators who understood that drug prices were too high, but they worried those price caps could undercut innovation from drugmakers in the U.S. 

Instead, the deal struck by lawmakers and White House aides to pass the law in 2022 ultimately turned to a different formula: capping them using calculations based on the price previously paid by Medicare and a fixed discount off the list price in the private U.S. market.

“President Biden and Democrats in Congress cared about getting something done, and so there was a compromise on the table that wasn’t perfect, but it was going to make a huge amount of difference. And so that’s the law they ultimately enacted,” said Christen Linke-Young, deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Mr. Biden.

Medicare has gone on to implement the law, resulting in talks that are continuing under the current Trump administration to lower the maximum price that the federal insurance program will pay for a growing list of costly drugs. 

“It’s a good thing for prescription drug costs in this country to be lower, we need to continue to work on that. And one of the ways to do that is actually put a proposal before Congress and get it enacted, so it has the force of law,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Mr. Biden.

Meanwhile, as the White House was working with their allies in Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration moved to formally scrap a bid by Mr. Trump to impose caps tied to lower prices in other high-income countries using executive power during his first term.

Called the “most favored nation” model, Trump officials had directed Medicare to only reimburse hospitals and clinics for some costly drugs based on the lowest price paid for in other high-income countries. 

CMS under Mr. Biden ultimately rescinded that move in 2022, after a legal fight that had blocked the proposal on the grounds that the Trump administration had unlawfully shortcutted the normal rulemaking steps to finalize the policy.

“The proposal was always pretty transparently illegal. The statute says that Medicare has to pay for prescription drugs in one particular way, and the Trump administration proposal was that we are going to ignore the statute and pay for drugs in an entirely different way. If the statute allowed that, a president before Donald Trump would have done it,” Linke-Young said.

A White House official under Mr. Trump disagreed with the accusation that their initial proposal was unlawful, arguing that the initial authority they used for the “demonstration” model in Medicare used powers that were broadly written by Democrats. 

While they are not planning to go down the exact same path, the official said, saying that they “learned certain things from that first demonstration,” the Trump administration believes they “absolutely have that authority in our pocket.” 

“We are confident that we have authorities within our government programs to do this. And any dispute from the Biden administration is an intentional misinterpretation of the statute for political reasons, because they are the ones that walked away,” the White House official said. 

Trump administration officials have painted their second run at the “most favored nation” idea as even broader in scope than their first term, which had been limited to only some costly drugs administered by healthcare providers through Medicare Part B. 

The White House official said Wednesday that they “firmly believe” they have the ability to pursue wider actions to push drugmakers to lower their prices within Medicare. They cited other authorities in the law being considered like section 402, which affords HHS powers to “develop and engage in experiments” which could affect payment rates in Medicaid as well. 

Asked this week on Fox Business Network whether the president’s promise of steep drug price cuts would also extend to Medicare Part D, which covers the broad swath of prescriptions filled at drug store pharmacies, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said “they absolutely will.”

“They’ll apply to Medicare, and they’ll apply in the private market as well,” Kennedy said.

Asked Tuesday whether he supported the president’s plan, Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he thought “it’ll be the subject of probably multiple lawsuits, and I think the courts will probably have something to say about it.”

Alexander Tin

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

Head of worker safety agency NIOSH restored, ahead of RFK Jr. hearing

The head of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and a handful of teams at the agency had their layoff notices rescinded Tuesday, multiple officials say, and several worker safety programs that had been eliminated by layoffs last month are being restored.

Letters reversing the layoffs arrived in the inboxes of some NIOSH staff a day ahead of House and Senate hearings Wednesday with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. where he was expected to face questions about the layoffs.

Health officials and scientists being brought back to work include everyone in NIOSH’s respiratory health division, division of safety research, division of compensation and analysis support and National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory according to an email obtained by CBS News.

“Secretary Kennedy has been working hard to ensure that the critical functions under NIOSH remain intact. The Trump Administration is committed to supporting coal miners and firefighters, and under the Secretary’s leadership, NIOSH’s essential services will continue as HHS streamlines its operations,” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an email.

A handful of NIOSH staff working in the agency’s World Trade Center Health Program previously had their layoffs reversed, after a second round of cuts at the agency earlier this month. 

“While we celebrate with those who received a rescission letter from HHS, I am mindful that others did not. I am hopeful that we can continue to make the case for reinstating everyone at NIOSH,” the agency’s now-reinstated director, Dr. John Howard, wrote in the email.

The reinstatements mean that some NIOSH programs might soon be able to resume, after they were previously hobbled by the layoffs.

For example, the agency’s National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory had been forced to suspend new approvals of equipment like new N95 respirators and protective gear for firefighters after the initial round of cuts on April 1. Investigations of workplace health risks through NIOSH’s Health Hazard Evaluation program were also upended by the layoffs, but staff working in those probes have now been reinstated.

But many workers also remain effectively laid-off at the wide-ranging agency, which functions as the research and testing counterpart to the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Mine Safety and Health Administration.

In NIOSH’s Spokane and Pittsburgh Mining Research Division, laid-off scientists and engineers were called back to work, but only for a few more weeks to wind down their laboratories and research before their layoff notices take effect. Those NIOSH employees have not received letters formally rescinding their layoffs, unlike some of their colleagues.

Part of their work includes overseeing miner safety programs like the personal dust monitors, or PDM, required by the Department of Labor for coal miners. NIOSH is responsible for testing PDM’s accuracy. The monitors are needed to reduce the risk of black lung disease. 

NIOSH had also been in the process of developing similar monitors for miners exposed to silica dust, before the layoffs gutted the teams overseeing that work. 

Other NIOSH teams like the Health Effects Laboratory Division were also not listed among the reinstatements.  

Other parts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which currently houses NIOSH, also remain off the job, despite calls from states and lawmakers for their reinstatements. HHS previously said it was planning on moving what remained of NIOSH into a new agency called the Administration for a Healthy America.

Among the CDC scientists still laid-off include the agency’s laboratories for investigating STD and viral hepatitis, which upended work helping states investigate outbreaks. Staff in the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, which had been responsible for a range of issues including lead poisoning and cruise ship outbreaks, also have not been reinstated.

Other workers who have been promised by their supervisors that they would be reinstated elsewhere at HHS have also so far not received notices, like at the Food and Drug Administration’s drug safety labs in Puerto Rico and Detroit. 

While their counterparts at food safety labs in Chicago and San Francisco were reinstated, multiple scientists in those labs said they had yet to receive formal written notices revoking their layoffs, weeks after they were told they would be reinstated.

Alexander Tin

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

HHS moving to fire probationary employees again, officials say

The Department of Health and Human Services is moving for a second time to fire probationary employees at the nation’s health agencies, multiple federal officials said, after many previously had their terminations paused amid court battles over their fate.

In mid-February, thousands of recently hired or promoted workers at the department had received letters firing them, but those firings were temporarily reversed by multiple court orders. Many workers who did not leave for other jobs have been on paid leave since.

“This is nothing of a surprise. These probationary employees were previously told in February that their jobs were impacted. This is the final step of the process where they receive their final notice,” an HHS spokesperson said in a statement.

It was not immediately clear whether all or only some health agencies would be impacted by the renewed wave of firings.

Two people at the National Institutes of Health said they had received instructions this week to carry out the terminations. Two people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they also had also been informed of the renewed termination effort.

“It’s all just so awful. Especially given how chronically underfunded and understaffed things are at the best of times,” said one CDC official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Two people said that letters started being sent in the U.S. mail Thursday. One person said they were surprised about the urgency of the orders to fire the workers, which was accompanied by a demand for frequent updates on the progress of the mailings.

The February firings of probationary workers were done differently than the department-wide layoffs that have rocked the nation’s health agencies in recent weeks as part of a sweeping restructuring ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Those February letters to probationary workers claimed that their firings were due to a finding that “you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the Agency.”

Workers and supervisors were surprised by the claim, given some of the fired employees had recently received high performance ratings and were recruited to fill key vacancies.

“It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in March.

In the months since, a handful of offices have been able to claw back their probationary workers by justifying their need to perform critical agency functions. Others have been working with probationary staff to start returning their equipment.

Alexander Tin

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.

Source link

Home & Kitchen

HHS to withhold some bonus pay earned by laid-off employees

The Department of Health and Human Services has decided to effectively block the payout of overdue bonuses to many of its laid-off employees, multiple health officials say. The bonuses were tied to high performance by the workers last year, before they were cut from the department.

“If the savings from the layoffs were pennies from the HHS budget, this is hundredths of a penny,” one current federal health agency employee said of the move.

While bonus payments usually go out in April to high-performing federal employees, the department had stalled them from being deposited. Now payouts are scheduled to go out after June 2, under the new decision.

This timing prevents the money from being paid out to people who were laid off or took buyouts or early retirement. Most of the workers laid off at the department are still on paid leave under federal policies, ahead of an official “separation” date scheduled for June 2.

“We apologize to those of you who were expecting bonuses and truly wish we could have delivered them,” human resources officials wrote to the staff of one HHS agency, in an email obtained by CBS News.

An appeal sought by some agency officials was “unsuccessful in having it overturned,” according to the email.

“That’s f****d up. They worked hard all last year for those awards,” a federal health agency employee said in a message.

The decision applies to all agencies and divisions that rely on the department’s central human resources office, the Staffing and Recruitment Operations Center, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

This includes laid-off employees of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, as well as a number of standalone offices within the department.

A handful of larger agencies where human resources offices are not directly controlled by the department, like at the National Institutes of Health, were able to pay out the bonuses.

Alexander Tin

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.

Source link