RFK Jr. fired the 26 experts running the federal Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program

A friend of mine, who this spring is glorying in the stunning flower garden she and her partner have planted around their house, has adopted the term bloomstrolling to describe the visits of many passersby who stop to chat about the fragrant, colorful delights now springing forth. An antidote or at least a balm for doomscrolling. She says she picked it up from someone on Bluesky.

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, depressingly, short of cloistering oneself, it’s hard to keep the bad political and economic news at bay for any extended period. Hard because, even if you’re lucky enough not to be directly affected by one or more of the arrogant, cruel, spiteful, nonsensical, malicious, and frequently illegal actions Elon Musk and his DOdGEy crew of twentysomething coders and the Outlaw Prez are inflicting on the nation, you almost certainly know someone who is. The ubiquity of the Trumpian assault is what drove the outpouring of protests across the nation Saturday and probably will again April 19.

But with entire agencies, departments, and divisions being wiped out, with the missions of others being sabotaged—often by appointees openly hostile to the operations they’ve been put in charge of—it’s easy to miss some of the damage being done to smaller programs.

Like, for instance, the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (CLPPP), which falls under the Centers for Disease Control, now under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A week ago, all 26 of the program’s staffers were suddenly put on administrative leave and told their jobs were subject a broad reduction in force. That effort will eliminate some 10,000 Health Department jobs. Together with the thousands of employees who have taken government severance, about a fourth of the department staff will be cut. 

At GreenWire, Ariel Wittenberg reported on the lead program firings, focusing on the already felt impact in Milwaukee. There, in January, officials in the 68,000-student school district learned that lead paint was poisoning children. The city health commissioner rang up the CLPPP for advice on what remedial action to do if neurotoxin tests for lead in these students come back positive. The phone calls continued until last Tuesday when there was no longer anyone at the other end answering.

“CDC was guiding us on how to triage these children we are anticipating to find, because we are just not equipped to handle the scale of the problem we are talking about here,” [the health commissioner] said in an interview Thursday evening. “Now I don’t have anyone to call now at CDC because the entire office is eliminated.” [...] 

Until Tuesday, CDC’s lead program promoted blood testing to screen toddlers across the country for lead poisoning so contamination can be stopped early. Staff in the office — and those at 62 state and local public health departments that receive CDC grants — screened blood lead data to identify potential poisoning cases. When cases were found, CDC experts advised local officials on how to reverse damage from potential exposures and prevent it in the future.

No other team in the federal government does that work. [...]

“For them to eliminate us, they must not understand what we do,” said a federal lead expert who was granted anonymity to speak freely while her employment is in flux. “People don’t know that your state health department is three people who are charged with doing everything health-related. We provide help to those individuals and surveil national data to protect our kids.”

Kennedy said Thursday that the lead program could be rolled into another division of HHS. But, as with so much of what’s happening in the federal world, the destruction was launched with no plan for creating a replacement. A spokeswoman for HHS said whatever’s done will be rolled into the new Administration for a Healthy America. But the AHA agency being identified as a possible destination for the lead prevention program has an entirely different mission than CLPPP’s. And none of its specialized expertise.

In Ohio, for instance, one county’s officials contacted CLPPP experts who figured out children living in rental properties were more likely to be exposed to lead paint and this required devising a different remedial strategy than that for home-owning families. Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said, “You do not want to be waiting until you have lead in your community to figure out the best practices for preventing exposure by trial and error. You want to be able to call the people with the broad expertise who have seen everything and know what works.”

A good portion of what RFK Jr. is doing is enough to make you roll your eyes all the way back into another dimension. However, axing a small group of experts who with their small budget deliver actionable assistance to communities that would otherwise struggle to protect vulnerable people—children being the most vulnerable—is not just stupid, it’s cruel. Dare I say, it’s evil. But in a biillionaire-heavy administration where empathy itself is suspect children’s well-being isn’t even an afterthought.