2025-04-27
15 分钟Hey, What's News listeners.
It's Sunday, April 27th.
I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News Sunday,
the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.
And this week, at home and abroad, America's approach to public health is changing rapidly.
Tens of thousands of federal health workers are poised to lose their jobs.
State health departments are seeing billions in funding from Washington being zeroed out.
And foreign aid cuts are interrupting programs for malaria prevention and treatment of HIV.
But along with cuts, new programs and new priorities are rising up in their place.
So what's in store as the U.S. embarks on its biggest public health shakeup in modern history?
Let's dive in.
Well, we can't list all of the changes that are being made to the U.S. public health system,
but let me run through a few of them very quickly.
The Department of Health and Human Services is shedding around 20,000 employees within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Entire departments are being eliminated, including for HIV prevention,
violence prevention, and injury prevention.
Also gone at the CDC is a team that maintained a database of injuries and violent deaths,
which was widely relied upon by policymakers and researchers.
And in a move that will be felt beyond the Beltway,
the administration has cut off billions of dollars in federal grants that were awarded to state and local health departments for a range of programs,