The White House Budget Guts HHS While Proclaiming to Heal America

The White House’s newly released 2026 budget proposal is not a vision for a healthier America. It is a coordinated dismemberment of the federal public health infrastructure, executed under the banner of “streamlining,” “accountability,” and a vague wellness crusade called “Make America Healthy Again.” If Congress enacts this proposal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will be eviscerated. So will the nation’s capacity to prevent disease, respond to pandemics, and base health policy on anything resembling scientific evidence.

This is not a correction. It is a rupture.

The CDC would see its funding cut by over 50 percent, eliminating entire centers responsible for chronic disease prevention, environmental health, injury control, and global health. These are not redundant programs. They are the country’s last lines of defense against conditions that kill far more Americans than infectious diseases. Heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer. These are not luxuries for states to manage with block grants and flexible guidance. They are national public health crises that require coordinated, federally led solutions.

The NIH fares no better. The proposed 40 percent cut is not merely a budget decision. It is a political indictment. The budget text accuses the agency of promoting “dangerous ideologies” and enabling COVID-related conspiracies. Rather than invest in reform or oversight, the administration proposes dismantling the agency, consolidating its work, and discarding entire institutes. This isn’t reform. It’s retaliation.

The elimination of AHRQ’s core research funding is perhaps the clearest signal of intent. This is not about duplication or fiscal prudence. It is about dismantling federal support for evidence-based evaluation of care quality, safety, and cost. That threatens not just research, but innovation pipelines and payment model development across Medicare and Medicaid.

And yet amid the wreckage, the administration finds $500 million to fund “MAHA,” a wellness initiative centered on food, lifestyle, and environmental toxins, stewarded by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is not a public health strategy. It is a cult of personality in policy form. MAHA lacks grounding in evidence-based practice and risks diverting scarce resources toward pseudoscience and ideological crusades.

There is no fiscal argument that can justify these cuts when defense spending and border infrastructure are simultaneously ballooning. This budget is not about hard choices. It is about ideological priorities. It devalues data, dismantles scientific institutions, and centralizes health authority in vague, personality-driven initiatives.

The impact will be devastating in operational terms. States will struggle to contain chronic conditions without CDC expertise and funding. Biomedical innovation will slow without NIH grants. Hospitals serving Medicaid populations may collapse under the weight of anticipated funding shortfalls. Public health preparedness, which once had bipartisan urgency, will now depend on political favor and media cycles.

The rhetoric of fiscal discipline obscures the real outcome: a deliberate rollback of federal responsibility for health. Not to strengthen the private sector, but to hollow out the very institutions that make modern healthcare functional, equitable, and safe.