RFK Jr.’s Axing of CDC Climate Program Will Hurt Americans, Ex-Official Says TechTricks365

(Bloomberg) — A team of federal officials tasked with helping cities and states navigate the effects of climate change on people’s health was disbanded Tuesday, part of a sweeping overhaul ordered by US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

More than a dozen staffers comprising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s climate health program were among the thousands of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services who received dismissal notices. The climate health program was part of the CDC’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice, which employed hundreds of people who worked on everything from asthma to lead poisoning prevention. All of those positions were cut as well. 

“These are people who have been doing exceptional work and gotten excellent performance reviews, but now they’re not there to help protect the health of people in places like Flint, Michigan,” said Paul Schramm, the climate program’s chief until he too was put on administrative leave on Tuesday. “There’s no one in the federal government doing that anymore.”

Schramm’s unit provided more than $4 million in grants to help local and state officials identify and respond to climate change and associated health problems. The loss of this funding leaves communities vulnerable at a time when health departments around the country are “already severely understaffed and severely underfunded,” said Schramm, who has worked at CDC for 16 years.

Schramm spoke with Bloomberg News about what the cuts to the climate health program mean for the communities it served. HHS did not respond to a request for comment. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you find out about the layoffs? 

I woke up early. Everyone’s been having trouble sleeping because of all this. So I got a text around 6 a.m. from one of the staff on my team saying they received a reduction-in-force notice. Then I got another text and then I checked [my email] and I had one. It became clear very quickly that our entire climate health program had received an email saying that [we] will be terminated due to reduction in force. Then we found out it was all of our division. [Schramm says he was told he was on administrative leave, effective immediately, until his last day on June 2.]

What type of work did the climate health program do, and what happens now that it’s been abruptly halted?

Communities and health departments around the country are no longer receiving funding and support to protect people from things like heat waves, flooding, wildfires, drought. Most of the time, a state doesn’t have their own resources or hasn’t allocated resources to come up with a heat-wave plan or open a system of cooling centers statewide, or even to have a communication plan to help get the message out on what you should do on particularly hot days. What we did was provide them with a framework to do that and to set up a program to implement these activities on the ground. 

Your team directly runs the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects, or BRACE, grants. What happens to those now? 

We funded 13 different jurisdictions — mostly states but also a territory, a city, a county — that were doing things on the ground to protect health from these different environmental disasters. They are supposed to be renewed. The renewal process starts next week, actually. We review what they’ve done, make sure that they’re abiding by all the rules of the grant, give them feedback on what they’ve proposed for next year. We won’t be here to do that. 

I’m assuming that they will not be funded for the next year of the project. The technical support staff won’t be here. What we call project officers, the people who actually do the budget and all the approvals, they all received RIF notices. 

What were you working on that may not get completed? 

There’s not a federal system to monitor pollen, but there are some private systems. We’ve been working for a long time to come up with data use agreements to make that data available to the public for people who have severe allergies and also for researchers. We were getting ready to put that up on our portals. I don’t see how that can happen now. 

What does pollen data have to do with climate change? 

We’ve done research on why pollen amounts are increasing and why pollen or allergy season is starting earlier in the year. We’ve shown that is tied to things like temperature and precipitation. And in many parts of the country, we’re getting more pollen than we’ve ever seen. In fact, right here in Atlanta, where there’s a monitor that’s been measuring [pollen] for 35 years, we set the all-time record on Saturday. And then we set the second-highest record on Sunday. It’s really important for researchers to have that data so they can continue to look into this, to find ways to protect people’s health and to both monitor the pollen and to model when pollen season is shifting so that people who need allergy shots or medication can do it [earlier] — because it’s earlier in the year than it’s ever been before. Now we won’t be here to do that. 

How do you feel about it all? 

Right now, I am mostly sad. It’s disappointing. I’ve worked with people, not just here at the CDC, but all of the hundreds of people I’ve collaborated with in local health departments and nonprofits, who see what a big problem that this is — how climate change is impacting health. We’ve got the data. We’ve seen it in action. We know about the thousands of people who die from heat each year. We know about the more than 100,000 who have to go to emergency rooms for heat. One of the things that’s really kept me going and so passionate about this is that there’s such a broad network of people working on this.

What I’m feeling right now is sad that the heart of that is being ripped out and the loss of expertise, the loss of funding — it’s going to hurt communities.

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