In a video obtained by ProPublica in fall 2024, Russell Vought—the architect of Project 2025, and later the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Donald Trump—said the following about career civil servants across the federal bureaucracy: “When [civil servants] wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. . . . We want to put them in trauma” …. In July 2025, Vought escalated his attacks on scientists who conduct research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). …
Throughout his first year in office, President Trump took action to turn his OMB director’s disdain for civil service into expansive policy action. These efforts extended to public health, as the Trump administration sought to significantly undermine the role that government health agencies across the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) play in formulating health policy. Mass firings, canceled research grants, and efforts to censor or abolish government regulatory authority have thrown the public health bureaucracy into crisis.
Grant cancellations interrupt the process of conducting scientific research and often deprive researchers of money used to pay for their own salaries and the salaries of their research staff. Coupled with mass firings resulting from organizational restructuring across HHS, which has led to thousands of career civil servants losing their jobs …, it is hard to ignore the profoundly personal toll that the Trump administration’s actions have on not just the day-to-day functioning of government health agencies but also on the people who work in, for, and with those organizations.
The deeply personal toll these policy actions take on those who work in public health fields may be a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s approach to health policy, as his administration’s attacks on public health agencies (and the broader public health community) appear to be motivated by a deep and highly personalized animosity toward experts in medical, scientific, and other fields. …
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