Headline: Iowa Capital Dispatch, 2/28/2025
Nada Hassanein reports:
Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture rushed to rehire workers who were involved in responding to the outbreak and were fired amid federal workforce cuts. These employees were part of a federal network that oversees labs responsible for collecting samples and confirming H5N1 tests.
State officials also fear funding cuts will hamper those federal labs, and say that by scrubbing some public health data from government websites, the administration may complicate efforts to track the outbreak. [emphasis added]
Federal labs are “key for us to be able to do our work, and we need to make sure those labs stay funded, or we can’t do what we do,” said Dr. Amber Itle, the state veterinarian for Washington state. Itle said federal money pays for most of her office’s bird flu efforts, and that the nation’s bird flu surveillance system — one of the most robust in the world — needs to stay in place.
President Donald Trump’s budget cuts and firings include thousands of terminations across the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, among others. While the USDA scrambled to rehire its workers, public health experts say federal agencies often work in tandem to respond to health emergencies.
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