CDC drowning safety team no longer afloat
With help from Danny Nguyen
Driving The Day
SAFETY NET GONE — Memorial Day, for many, marks the start of the swimming season. This year, the federal team that tracks drowning incidents and issues public water safety alerts has been disbanded, POLITICO's Sophie Gardner reports.
In April, President Donald Trump laid off the team at the CDC responsible for drowning prevention work.
Why it matters: That team regularly publicized the latest statistics for U.S. drowning deaths each May to inform families of the risks and also worked with partners like the YMCA and the American Red Cross to enroll at-risk children in swimming lessons. That collaboration has been halted.
The cuts come as drowning deaths rose during the pandemic, hitting 4,300 in 2023, the most recent data, compared with around 4,000 in 2019. They rose even more among the youngest children, ages 1 to 4, for whom drowning is the No. 1 cause of death — according to the team's previously published numbers.
'I can't tell you how many media calls we got after that report was released because I think it was a shocking number to people, and they wanted to know what's going on,' said Amy Hill, who works on Chicago's water safety task force, referring to a CDC study released last May. 'When the CDC issues a report like that, people pay attention.'
Work halted: States will continue to report drownings through the CDC's National Vital Statistics System, but the data will no longer have a team to analyze it. Two CDC scientists, who spoke with POLITICO on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said the team had been close to publishing a handful of reports before the layoffs — including one on drowning deaths among people with autism.
'The way that this was done means that there [were] a lot of taxpayer dollars that were wasted here because there was work already in process,' a CDC official granted anonymity for fear of retribution told POLITICO about the layoffs. 'We could have done it in a way that did not undermine all of this critical work, especially for something like drowning, that literally nobody else is working on.'
RFK Jr.'s view: At a Senate hearing on Trump's fiscal 2026 budget proposal Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. broadly defended downsizing federal health agencies as necessary to stem what he described as bureaucratic bloat that occurred during the Biden administration and to restrain the federal deficit. But he wasn't specifically asked about the cuts to the drowning-prevention team.
'The safety and well-being of all Americans — especially our nation's children — is a top priority for HHS and Secretary Kennedy,' the HHS spokesperson told POLITICO in an email. 'The Department is strongly committed to preventing tragic and preventable deaths, including those caused by drowning.'
The spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question asking for details.
WELCOME TO TUESDAY PULSE. We hope you had a relaxing Memorial Day weekend! I spent it watching the Indy 500 for the first time. Send your tips, scoops and feedback to ccirruzzo@politico.com and khooper@politico.com and follow along @ChelseaCirruzzo and @Kelhoops.
In Congress
JOHNSON'S SENATE PLEA — When the Senate returns the first week of June to consider the sweeping megabill passed through the House last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson has a plea for GOP senators: Don't make major changes, POLITICO's Gregory Svirnovskiy reports.
'I encourage them to do their work, of course, as we all anticipate,' Johnson told CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday on 'State of the Union.' 'But to make as few modifications to this package as possible, because remembering that we've got to pass it one more time to ratify their changes in the House. And I have a very delicate balance here, very delicate equilibrium that we've reached over a long period of time. And it's best not to meddle with it too much.'
Why? Jamming the megabill through the House the first time was a Herculean task for Johnson and his allies in leadership. It required a visit from President Donald Trump to the Capitol and careful negotiating by the speaker to bring the chamber's many coalitions aboard. Doing it a second time — with major changes from the Senate side — could prove impossible.
What could change: Key senators are already looking to make modifications, with different factions holding that the bill goes too far in its approach to Medicaid and clean-energy tax credit cuts. Others, such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), say it doesn't move the ball far enough. Johnson wants to cut spending by roughly $6 trillion instead of the $1.5 trillion in the House bill.
'This is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending,' Ron Johnson told Tapper, also on Sunday. 'And again, I think you can do it in the spending that we would eliminate, people wouldn't even notice. But you have to do the work, which takes time.'
'The problem is the math doesn't add up,' Paul told host Shannon Bream on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'They're going to explode the debt by the House says $4 trillion, the Senate's actually been talking about exploding the debt $5 trillion.'
MURTHY ON SOCIAL MEDIA — As lawmakers work to push forward the Trump administration's megabill, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is calling on Congress to implement social media safeguards for children, POLITICO's Amanda Friedman reports.
Why it matters: While the sweeping legislative package has implications for immigration, defense and health care, it gave limited attention to online safety or tech regulation.
'It's the equivalent of putting our kids in cars with no seat belts, with no airbags, and having them drive on roads with no speed limits and no traffic lights,' said Murthy, who served under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, during an interview on NBC's 'Meet the Press' that aired Sunday. 'And that is just morally unacceptable. I think Congress has so far failed in its responsibility to protect our kids.'
Efforts to establish rules for platforms popular among young people, like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, have long stalled amid industry lobbying and political gridlock.
For a solution, Murthy called on Congress to implement 'real safety standards' for social media platforms, including issuing warning labels so that 'parents and kids are aware of the risks.' Murthy also stressed the importance of increasing data-transparency requirements for platforms, comparing the measure to the historical precedent of auto safety laws.
'Researchers routinely say they can't get the full data about the impact of these platforms on our kids' health from the companies,' Murthy said. 'But just like we did for cars a few decades ago, we'll be putting safety standards that got us seat belts, airbags, crash testing, and those have reduced the number of deaths.'
'But it's not too late,' Murthy said, referring to Congress. 'They need to step up and act now.'
Lobbying
3 MUSKETEERS TAKE ON CAPITOL HILL — Mars Incorporated, the company that manufactures M&Ms, Skittles, Snickers and other popular candies, has hired a lobbying firm prominent in Republican circles as the Trump administration weighs crushing regulations on the artificial foods industry, Danny reports.
A general disclosure filing shows the group hired the Duberstein Group, a lobbying firm founded by Ken Duberstein, who served as chief of staff to former President Ronald Reagan.
The hiring comes as the confectionary industry braces for a crushing blow from the Make America Healthy Again Commission, a brainchild of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which will unveil a regulatory framework to reel in the food and pharma industries that the group accuses of poisoning children and causing a surge in chronic disease.
It also comes days after the first MAHA commission report, expected to emphasize the dangers of products used and produced by those sectors, but which barely mentioned those industries.
The agrochemical, artificial food and farming industries have emphasized to lawmakers and Kennedy over the past weeks that any regulation could seriously hurt their bottom line. And if the first report is any indication, those lobbying efforts are working.
On the Mars ticket are David Schiappa, a former secretary of the Senate Republican minority; Katherine Winkler Keating, a former chief of staff to Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.); Benjamin Howard, the former deputy assistant of legal affairs to President Donald Trump; and Elizabeth Kelley; who was former President Barack Obama's special assistant on economic policy.
WHAT WE'RE READING
NBC News reports on how artificial intelligence can address medical errors.
The Wall Street Journal reports on a study showing that fears about food spoiling could be keeping some people from healthy foods.
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