Leaked HHS budget slashes $40 billion; axes Head Start, LIHEAP programs

A leaked draft of the Department of Health and Human Services budget reveals the administration is planning to cut more than $40 billion in funding, or 30% of its budget, by consolidating or eliminating dozens of programs and restructuring federal health agencies.

The unfinalized budget, reportedly leaked to Inside Medicine and the Washington Post, follows the Trump administration’s goal of cutting costs, downsizing government, and slashing “woke” initiatives like diversity, equity, and inclusion spending.

The proposal would also establish a new health agency under HHS — the Administration for a Healthy America — which will receive at least $14 billion to do the work of many programs the budget intends to cut.

Among other grants and programs, the budget reportedly zeroes out funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program, the Rural Community Development Program, the Mining Research program, and a handful of initiatives studying autism, Lyme disease, and firearm injuries. Notably, these issues can receive federal support and research in other ways at HHS and other agencies.

The budget reportedly also consolidates or eliminates dozens of offices or institutes within agencies, including the Office of Population Affairs, the National Institute of Nursing Research, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Democrats have called the proposal, which is subject to change, “dangerous,” particularly blasting its decision to scrap the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) program and the Head Start program, which provides early childhood education and nutrition services.

HHS has not issued a direct response to the budget leak. The document acknowledges that “[m]any difficult decisions were necessary to reach the funding level provided.”

The department plans to give the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission $500 million to investigate “the root causes of America’s escalating health crisis” with a focus on childhood chronic diseases.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would refocus on disease surveillance and outbreak preparedness and response. Notably, the budget allocates $52 million to establish a “Biothreat Radar Detection System” that will conduct continuous pathogen surveillance “with the goal of detecting a novel pathogen before it reached 0.017% of the U.S. population.”

The Food and Drug Administration would also see major changes under the budget plan, which nixes the FDA’s direct involvement in routine inspections of food facilities, expanding state contracts to cover 100% of those inspections.

Instead, FDA would place a renewed focus on food safety and regulatory oversight so that certain chemicals and food additives “can be expeditiously removed from our food supply,” a major goal of Kennedy’s.

Other changes the budget draft proposes include:

Increasing HHS oversight of the 340B drug discount program and requiring Health Centers participating in the 340B drug discount program to charge lower income patients no more than the actual discount price and dispensing fee. Consolidating programs related to rape and sexual or domestic violence into a single grant programEliminating the Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiative and the CDC Domestic HIV/AIDS Prevention and Surveillance activities, and consolidating those and related initiatives into one grant program. Deleting DEI and gender identity programs across federal health agencies, such as the Minority AIDS Initiative Cutting all funding to the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund