Science News & Analysis

Pandemic infrastructure dismantled: Epidemic Intelligence Service cut, pandemic office vacated, WHO gag order imposed (April 1, 2025)

April 1, 2025 — On the same day as the broader HHS mass layoffs, the Trump administration eliminated or severely reduced several of the nation's specific pandemic detection and response capabilities. The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) — the CDC's elite corps of field epidemiologists, trained to investigate disease outbreaks domestically and internationally, known as "disease detectives" — was cut as part of the broader CDC reductions. The team responsible for publishing the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) — the CDC's century-old flagship public health surveillance publication, read by physicians and public health officials worldwide as an early warning system for emerging disease threats — was eliminated entirely.

In late January, USAID had already terminated the $100 million STOP Spillover program, a five-year project operating in Uganda, the DRC border region, Liberia, and four other countries specifically designed to detect zoonotic spillovers of Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, and other hemorrhagic fever viruses before they reached human populations. On January 26, the administration had also imposed a gag order prohibiting all CDC communication with the WHO — including on active outbreak monitoring and response. The White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), created by Congress in 2022 as a statutory cross-agency pandemic coordination hub, was stripped of leadership and staff; by late summer, it was completely empty, with the last staffer departing in June 2025.

"Leaving zero full-time pandemic preparedness experts in the White House is not just shortsighted — it's reckless," wrote two former OPPR officials. By May 2026, as a hantavirus cluster and a new Ebola outbreak in the DRC put these gaps to the test, experts noted that 80 percent of CDC's top director positions remained vacant, funding for state preparedness grants had been cut by $750 million, and the agency had still not issued a routine Health Alert Network notice on the hantavirus cases — a basic response step that would normally have been automatic.