Trump’s Shutdown of More Than One Quarter of Federal Health Advisory Committees Is Literally Sickening
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Trump administration has terminated, diminished, and badly distorted more than one quarter of the expert advisory committees serving the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with negative consequences for public health, according to a new report from Public Citizen released today.
At the beginning of 2025 there were 273 scientific advisory committees focused on the health sciences, including those directly serving the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since then, HHS has terminated 75 of its advisory committees, 27% of them. Forty-nine of these committees were at the NIH, nine were at the CDC, and four were at the FDA.
Many committees have been completely remade to put the toxic MAHA agenda above all other considerations. The Trump administration’s most worrisome actions include the deplorable recasting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; the termination of grant-prioritization councils for the NIH; and the neglect of disease-focused FDA committees that have long afforded both patients and non-governmental experts seats at the evaluation table for new and potentially worrisome drugs and medical devices.
Affected committees include those that deal with childhood vaccines and broader infectious disease control practices, heritable disorders in newborns, Alzheimer’s care, autism, rural health services, basic and clinical scientific research funding, long COVID, preventative medicine, inflammatory disease, pharmaceutical science, medical devices, substance abuse prevention and treatment, occupational health, global health research, and more.
“All Americans, including patients, lawmakers, and scientists, have every right to be incensed at the damage Trump has done to federal health advisory committees,” said Michael Abrams, M.P.H., Ph.D., senior health researcher at Public Citizen and author of the report. “Trump’s actions are undermining biomedical research, long-standing processes for the approval of new drugs and medical devices, and federal vaccine policy. Silencing and biasing external experts makes HHS vulnerable to stagnation and corruption that erodes the health of all Americans.”