Project 2025: Destroy the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Under the guise of promoting the President's agenda (Scroll to the end to listen)

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

Does anyone remember the COVID-19 pandemic?

Millions of people dead. Millions more saddled with long-term health consequences. Red-state politicians punishing school districts and businesses that required masks and vaccinations. A President telling people to inject themselves with bleach.

If Christo-fascist Republicans win in November, public health failures will doom humanity. Let’s break down how a future Republican administration could pollute public health directives using Project 2025 as a guide.

COVID and Structural Reform. COVID-19 exposed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government. CDC continually misjudged COVID-19, from its lethality, transmissibility, and origins to treatments. We were told masks were not needed; then they were made mandatory. CDC botched the development of COVID tests when they were needed most. When it was too late, we were told to put our lives on hold for “two weeks to flatten the curve;” that turned into two years of interference and restrictions on the smallest details of our lives. Congress should ensure that CDC’s legal authorities are clearly defined and limited to prevent a recurrence of any such arbitrary and vacillating exercise of power.

Project 2025, page 452

While almost no one would laud the totality of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 response, the framers of Project 2025 display a complete disdain for medical science. Experimentation, often in real time, is fundamental to the scientific method. A novel illness will always represent a moving target for scientists and researchers, often leading to recommended changes over time.

Project 2025 policies would turn the CDC’s public health authority over to a Republican President and Congress who would ignore medical advice that is not politically expedient. Like telling Americans to inject horse deworming medication. Or swallow all the tonic at the supermarket. Or insist that the weakest must die for the good of the economy.

The CDC should be split into two separate entities housing its two distinct functions. On the one hand, the CDC is now responsible for collecting, synthesizing, and publishing epidemiological data from the individual states—a scientific data-gathering function. This information is crucial for medical and public health researchers around the country. On the other hand, the CDC is also responsible for making public health recommendations and policies—an inescapably political function. At times, these two functions are in tension or clear conflict.

These distinct functions should be separated into two entirely separate agen-cies with a firewall between them. We need a national epidemiological agency responsible only for publishing data and required by law to publish all of the data gathered from states and other sources. A separate agency should be responsible for public health with a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.

Project 2025, pages 452 - 453

Why do they recommend this splitting of functions? I can’t explain it any better than they do.

The CDC can and should make assessments as to the health costs and benefits of health interventions, but it has limited to no capacity to measure the social costs or benefits they may entail. For example, how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?

Project 2025, page 453

For a Christian Nationalist, who cares how many people die as long as they sat in a pew or endured other religious indoctrination beforehand?

By statute or regulation, CDC guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character. For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children “should be” masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building. Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers. We have learned that when CDC says what people “should” do, it readily becomes a “must” backed by severe punishments, including criminal penalties. CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the “should” and “must” policy calls to politically accountable parties.

Project 2025, page 454

Project 2025 takes stewardship of the public health from a government agency staffed by medical and scientific experts and gives it to a conservative President and his stooges. Every public health decision will be politicized through the lens of “how does this impact our ability to gaslight Americans into thinking we’re doing a good job?”

To prepare for the next pandemic, we need robust investment in public health agencies like the CDC. Project 2025 only invests in one thing: Christo-fascist Republicans’ complete and total power.

Tomorrow, we will cover how Project 2025 will weaponize what remains of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their plans for detailed health reporting will impact every American. Thank you for supporting this work.