For 72 years, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been improving America’s health, whether it be through the eradication of dangerous diseases like Polio, measles, or malaria, or with its efforts against the tobacco industry and its vehicle safety improvements. 

But with the current administration, there has been a flurry of new policies, including cuts and changes to almost every department of government. However, perhaps the branch hardest hit has been HHS, which is responsible for various tasks, including funding medical research, testing the safety of food and drugs, monitoring disease outbreaks, and giving vaccination recommendations.

In the last eight months of the administration, HHS has faced cut after cut. First, with a flurry of layoffs, then a wave of grant cuts, including those for foodborne illness detection, vacation for children, and more. Now, a new bill that passed the House of Representatives plans to cut another 18% including the cancer institute and CDC. This all amounts to nearly ¼ of the employees, or 20,000 people.

Casey Cutler, district nurse, has already begun to see the changes under the new Health Department Administration (HDA).

“What we’re going to be seeing is the changes with our vaccinations, specifically the [COVID-19] boosters, and the way that they’ve altered the recommendations for the age brackets and health history,” Cutler said. “We could very well see a bloom in COVID infections this year that we haven’t seen since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s the biggest concern.”

 To illustrate the risks in the changes in regulations and the funding we’ve had, Cutler explains that we have already seen similar issues occur with measles.

“Recent historical evidence was the measles outbreak that occurred in Texas,” Cutler said. “We did see a very slow response with the unvaccinated community in Texas, which then didn’t help the contagion get contained. Down in Texas, we saw many more measles cases, so we had to just base [our response] on the slow response of the administration in implementing vaccines for the measles.”

Before the measles outbreak in Texas, the disease was eradicated in the USA, but now it’s making a resurgence.

“US measles cases since the outbreak in Texas have now hit a higher level than they have ever been since the first declaration of elimination in 2000,” Cutler said. “Although a variety of outbreaks have occurred before, the nearly 1,400 cases the US has now are far more than we ever had since its elimination in 2000, and [are] at a relatively unprecedented growth rate.” 

Cuts to HHS will likely affect all levels of health research and disease prevention.

“When they defund health care on a federal level, that means that as we get [it] distributed through the state level, we’re going to have less and less funding to even be able to implement protocols and guidelines that we may be doing outside of [Washington], DC recommendations,” Cutler said. “So even if we are in the state of Oregon, and want to continue to offer up COVID boosters for everybody, we may not have the federal funding to be able to do so.”

Local healthcare communities in Oregon, even those within the West Linn-Wilsonville school district, will likely soon begin to face problems and grow under greater strain as the infectious disease season begins. 

“I think that all the community-based healthcare systems in the United States, as well as specifically in Oregon, I think we’re all kind of getting prepared for that possibility,” Cutler said.

Although these cuts will affect everyone, they are more likely to have guarders effects on underfunded communities.

“In the way that our system, the healthcare system, is set up, it is almost always the less privileged and underfunded people,” Cutler said. “What we see in this country is that the communities that need the most, which would be the underfunded poor communities, are the ones that are going to be hardest hit because they have just fewer resources.”