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How Trump’s Budget Cuts Threaten Community Health
The headline is about the Trump Administration’s budget for America stripping $163 billion from federal government spending across the board. That’s cuts to education, housing, climate, and other programs – and $3.59 billion of those cuts are coming from eliminating programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In what the budget calls eliminating “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary programs”, the cuts target a number of centers within the CDC including the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion, which “supports healthy behaviors and preventive medical care to help people prevent and manage chronic diseases” such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. One way the center does that is through creating environments that make it easier for people to be physically active.
Yet, elsewhere in the budget, $500 million is allocated for the new Make America Healthy Again program to give the Secretary of Health and Human Services resources to address nutrition, physical activity, and active lifestyles.
As we noted in our statement opposing CDC cuts earlier this week, the first step to active living is to ensure people have safe and accessible places for people to bike and walk, or as the CDC says, “actions that improve environments can reach a lot of people at once which saves money and protects lives.”
Programs within the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion are projected to save over $500 billion in health care costs. We should be expanding this program, not eliminating it.
Earlier this week, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing “examining the consequences of the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and our entire public health system.” In testifying, public health experts noted the CDC’s mission and the goal of public health is to prevent death and injury before it happens. Building safer places for people to be active is public health infrastructure – something Trump’s budget claims it would maintain.
Also at the hearing, Ranking Member of the Committee Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) decried the proposed slashes to CDC’s public health work and the notion that prevention programs for HIV, tobacco, drowning, asthma, lead poisoning, and gun violence are “so-called waste”. Among those are efforts aimed at preventing teenagers from starting to smoke. “The life of a teenager that does not become addicted to cigarettes is not a waste,” DeLauro said.
Likewise, preventing a young adult from developing Type 2 diabetes by encouraging bicycling is not a waste. Preventing heart disease by making it safer to bike thereby extending a mother’s life to see her children grow older is not a waste. And preventing the death of a child crossing a street because we built safer roads is most certainly not a waste.