03 Apr American Academy of HIV Medicine Statement on the Cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services
Eliminating Essential Public Health Services Harms All Americans
On Tuesday, April 1, the Trump Administration began sweeping cuts to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which resulted in the dismantling of a range of divisions and agencies within the HHS. The week prior, hundreds of HIV-related research grants were abruptly cut from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by the Administration. The Academy denounces these attacks to public health and scientific advancement and calls on Congress to halt these actions that will ultimately lead to patient and community harm and an erasure of decades of progress in combating the HIV epidemic.
“Destroying federal public health infrastructure will be detrimental to the health of all Americans, and especially devastating to communities impacted by HIV,” says Bruce J. Packett, II, AAHIVM executive director. “From a halting of advances in new HIV prevention and treatment medications, to the wholesale dismantling of federal HIV and STI infrastructure that coordinates with states, local health departments, community clinics and other HIV service providers, to the inability to track localized outbreaks in real time, the devastating outcomes of this week’s actions cannot be understated.”
The HHS cuts affect many agencies that are instrumental in supporting and advancing HIV prevention and treatment, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of HIV Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, to name a few. These are agencies who have worked tirelessly, in interdepartmental fashion to help implement President Trump’s 2019 Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative, which received widespread bipartisan support to work toward the goal of reducing new HIV infections in the United States by 90 percent by 2030. Without a robust federal infrastructure for public health, sexually transmitted infections, and HIV, it will be impossible to meet that goal. Moreover, it is likely that the U.S. will lose and reverse the progress it has made in combatting HIV.
Crippling the agencies that oversee health care data, support new treatments, and provide grant funding for scientific and clinical research is not the way to make America healthy. Congress must act now to mitigate the harm caused by the broad and haphazard cuts to HHS. The Academy calls on our Congressional representatives to address the Trump Administration’s actions – through hearings and legislation – in order to develop a clear accounting of what programs were dismantled, outline the information and services lost from those programs, and ensure that these are all restored and protected.