Trump's Trials - Trump cuts to advisory groups leaves hospitals without key expertise on disease

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Under the Trump administration, dozens of advisory committees have been ended or frozen, including one on controlling infection in healthcare settings. NPR's Katia Riddle reports.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

It's Trump's terms from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. Every episode, we bring you a story from NPR's recent coverage of the 47th president with a focus on ways he's using power like no president before him. Here is the latest from NPR. From NPR news, I'm Lela Falded. We've been taking stock recently of science that has not been done under President Trump. Federal advisory groups help guide the government on research and science issues.

Since Trump took office, dozens of those groups have been canceled or frozen. Among them is one dedicated to preventing infection in health care settings. NPR's Kedia Riddle reports. Drug-resistant organisms are a vexing problem for infectious disease experts. For years, doctors have been waging war on dangerous bacteria like MRSA. But in the last decade, a new villain appeared on the scene of fungus called Candida Oras. It was first identified in the ear canal of a nurse. homepatient in Japan in 2009. And it really wasn't around before that. Scott Roberts is an infectious

disease doctor at Yale. He treated one of the first patients in the U.S. with this fungus. This was maybe 2018, 2019. And at the time, not much was known about it. And to this day, we're still trying to grapple with where this came from. Why is it spreading so fast? And it's a bit of a mystery. Candida oras can survive on surfaces and cause life-threatening infections, especially in people who are immunocompromised. Once it takes up residents in a hospital, it's hard to evict. For all these reasons, says Roberts, he was grateful when the federal government stepped in

to help figure out how to fight it by bringing it to the attention of the healthcare infection control practices advisory committee or Hickpack. But in March of last year, that committee was terminated along with its efforts to help fight Canada or us. And so to hear that, we're losing a federal advisory committee on this and we're losing federal assistance is only going to make the problem worse. Fighting Dangerous Fungi was one of many problems that the committee was working on.

It was staffed by a group of volunteers that brought perspectives from health care facilities, big and small, rural and urban, to work together on problems. The group would then make recommendations to the CDC to help guide policy. Hillary Babcock was one member. She says the reason this committee was important was not just because of their expertise. The CDC is already full of experts. she says. They don't need help necessarily knowing, like, what does the literature show. But what they don't do is work in hospitals and health care systems. Babcock is an infectious disease doctor in St. Louis.

She says having this range of experts to give real-time feedback to the people working inside the federal government was invaluable. So that's really what the committees bring to that space, is that sort of lived experience of how this guidance works in those settings. In an email, representatives from the White House did not comment on this particular committee, but said that all committees that were terminated were, quote, found to be redundant, unnecessary, or ineffective, unquote. But industry groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science have raised concerns that cutting these committees will hamstring urgently needed research.

Carrie Wallinitz has, for years worked with these federal advisory committees. As a federal official, I found advisory committees to be really helpful to me in my sort of thinking and policy development. Wallinitz was an official at the NIH. Now she works in health care policy and advocacy. They would like challenge me on things that I, you know, I thought to be true. They brought up, you know, real world issues that me from my sort of seat within government would not necessarily have thought of. In the case of Candida Oras, the number of cases in the U.S. continues to grow. Scott Roberts, the infectious disease doctor, says one of the reasons is that protocols around disinfecting for this specific fungus are not well understood.

If you don't adequately disinfect that medical equipment before you go to the next patient, you really risk transmitting it from one person to another. Robert says that's part of the reason this committee's work was so critical. We really rely on federal assistance here to say, you know, this is a a recommended screening protocol. Everybody should be doing this. Without these recommendations and guidelines, says Roberts, doctors like him, are left with a patchwork of protocols. And that's no match for a sneaky drug-resistant fungus. Katie Riddle in PR News. A note before we go, if you value this show and want to help keep it going, a free and

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