NEW YORK (AP) — A year ago, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he wanted to rebuild trust in federal health agencies, and vowed to employ “radical transparency” to do it.
But many types of health information that steadily flowed from the government for years or decades has been delayed, deleted and in some cases stopped all together.
The collection and sharing of information was hurt by sweeping layoffs at federal agencies and the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Officials took down health agency websites to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump, causing outside researchers to archive federal health datasets and leading to a lawsuit that ended with a judge ordering the websites’ restoration.
Ariel Beccia, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said changes in the flow of federal health information have made her angry.
“We pay taxes to hopefully have good, inclusive public health practice and data,” said Beccia, who focuses on the health of LGBTQ youth. “The past year it felt like every single day, something that I and my colleagues use daily in our work has just been taken away” by federal officials.
Asked about now-unavailable data and information, a spokesman for Kennedy said the premise of The Associated Press’ inquiry was flawed and relied on selective and inaccurate characterizations.
“Secretary Kennedy is leading the most transparent HHS in history, with unprecedented disclosure and openness aimed at restoring public trust in federal health agencies,” said the spokesman, Andrew Nixon.
He pointed to an HHS webpage on the agency’s transparency efforts, which includes a list of canceled government contracts and the repackaging of previously available information — including a U.S. Food and Drug Administration “chemical contaminants transparency tool.”
Here are some examples of how less information is coming out of federal public health agencies than in past administrations.
The Project 2025 blueprint that’s been influential to the Trump administration called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to enhance its data collection of U.S. abortions, but the agency failed to post its annual abortion surveillance report in November. (Nixon said it will come out this spring.)
HHS officials blamed the delay on the CDC’s former chief medical officer, Dr. Debra Houry, saying she directed staff to return state-submitted abortion data rather than analyze it. But Houry — who resigned months before the report was slated to come out — said that claim was false. She says the report was derailed because of HHS cutbacks to the funding and staff needed to get it done.
Fighting the nation’s overdose epidemic has long been a priority for both Republicans and Democrats. And the federal government has continued to collect and report on death certificate-based information on drug deaths.
But the Trump administration curtailed other kinds of overdose work, including shutting down the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), which tracked emergency department visits — an early alert about drug-use trends. It was discontinued “as part of a broader effort to align agency activities with agency and administration priorities,” officials posted.
Nixon said past DAWN data will remain available. But some experts say that’s not enough, and recently likened the termination of DAWN and other recent changes to spreading cracks in a windshield that makes it harder to see what’s ahead in the epidemic.
Smoking has long been known as the nation’s leading preventable cause of death. The federal government for decades has not only monitored what percentage of people use cigarettes and other tobacco products, but also run successful public education campaigns like the FDA’s “Real Cost” and the CDC’s “Tips from Former Smokers.”
Those campaigns were ended last year, although Nixon said the FDA campaign will return.
Meanwhile, layoffs to CDC staff who worked on smoking meant an important survey on youth smoking and vaping — normally out in the fall — was never released. Those layoffs also put a stop to work on a report on smoking for the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General.
For three decades, federal health officials tracked food poisoning infections caused by eight germs. In July, the Trump administration scaled back required reporting to just two pathogens monitored by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, known as FoodNet.
Under the change, health departments in 10 states that participate in the joint state and federal program only monitor infections caused by salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. Tracking is optional for infections caused by campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio and Yersinia.
CDC officials said the change would allow the agency to “steward resources effectively.” Food safety experts said the move undercuts the nation’s ability to accurately monitor risks in the U.S. food supply.
Even before Kennedy was confirmed, President Donald Trump signed executive orders to roll back protections for transgender people and terminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
That caused the CDC to remove from its website a range of information about HIV and transgender people. The government also stopped collecting and reporting crucial survey findings on transgender students — data that has shown higher rates of depression, drug use, bullying and other problems.
That data is used to help fund and focus suicide-prevention programs and other efforts. And this is all happening as the federal and some state governments try to discourage gender-affirming care, ban transgender youth from sports and dictate which bathrooms they can use, Beccia said.
“Without the data, we can’t systematically show the harm that’s being done” by these policies, Beccia said.
Nixon said the data collection and reporting now aligns with agency priorities.
Before he was health secretary, Kennedy was a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement and repeatedly accused federal health advisers of conflicts of interest that aligned them with vaccine-makers. In June, he dismissed the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and named his own replacements.
A federal official said the government would release ethics forms for the new members. But it didn’t.
Meanwhile, a CDC website that compiles disclosures by past and current ACIP members has more than 200 entries of former panel members, but information on only one Kennedy appointee. Among those missing from that list are Martin Kulldorff, the initial chair of Kennedy’s reconstituted committee, who had been paid to be an expert witness in legal cases against the vaccine-maker Merck. Another is current member Dr. Robert Malone, who also was paid as an expert witness in vaccine litigation.
AP Health Writer JoNel Aleccia contributed to this report.
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