Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s radical reshaping of the Department of Health and Human Services isn’t just impacting the big-name agencies — it has the potential to sharply disrupt a little-known agency that plays an important role during natural disasters and public health crises.
Two former employees of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response and one former high-ranking HHS official told NOTUS that Kennedy’s HHS reorganization could fundamentally impede ASPR from carrying out its mission of preparing the federal government to respond to emergencies. The HHS reorganization plan that Kennedy proposed in March would demote ASPR from an independent agency to a subdivision of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The Secretary is losing the Swiss Army knife that he has, and he doesn’t know that he’s got this great capability, because the best I can tell, he hasn’t really had to use it,” said Dawn O’Connell, who served as assistant secretary of ASPR during the Biden administration, about the potential changes to ASPR. “But when you need it, when there’s a hurricane and hospitals are shut down, or when there’s a wildfire and families need to be reunited with their the ashes of their loved ones, when there’s an airplane crash, like there was in Washington a couple months ago, when there’s a pandemic or an infectious disease outbreak — that’s when you need us, and we’re ready.”
The current status of ASPR’s move to CDC is unclear. A CDC official speaking under condition of anonymity told NOTUS that “conversations are ongoing.”
In response to questions about the move and its impacts to ASPR’s capabilities, an HHS spokesperson said ASPR “will transfer to CDC, reinforcing CDC’s core mission to protect Americans from health threats” but didn’t provide any details about when the move will take place.
“CDC brings unmatched infrastructure, global surveillance, and technical capabilities,” the spokesperson added. “Integrating ASPR within this framework enhances — not hinders — our ability to coordinate effectively across agencies. While some anonymous voices remain attached to outdated bureaucratic silos, this Department is committed to outcomes for the American people.”
ASPR was formed as a staff office of HHS in 2006 as a panacea following the federal government’s sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina. It was later elevated to its own operating division during the COVID-19 pandemic. During a natural disaster or public health emergency, ASPR coordinates the responses from other agencies. All of the former ASPR employees who spoke to NOTUS said that job could be made more difficult if ASPR is made a subdivision of the CDC, because its independence made it a more effective mediator between the health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.
“ASPR has to work with and knit together all the other different parts of government. It has to be, in my mind, pretty independent to be able to do that,” said a former high-ranking HHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns of retribution from the Trump administration. “If, suddenly, now it’s under CDC and reports to a CDC director, that basically means the CDC is in charge. NIH isn’t going to listen to CDC. FDA is not going to listen to CDC.”
O’Connell agreed that putting ASPR under CDC would undermine its ability to oversee the actions of other agencies during an emergency — and not just because federal agencies don’t typically like it when other agencies tell them what to do.
ASPR does more than just get the health agencies to work together during an emergency: It also deploys its own teams of doctors, veterinarians or even mortuary and victim identification professionals to disaster sites. In some ways, O’Connell said, the CDC’s strengths don’t necessarily play into ASPR’s rapid response mindset. “There’s a reason why CDC and ASPR were not the same,” she said.
The former HHS official said that they don’t think the CDC “has the mindset to respond fast when needed.”
“I also don’t think they have a good understanding of how the healthcare system and hospital preparedness work other than worrying about infection control,” the former official said. “I feel like we’re in for a pretty substantial culture clash.”
ASPR is also the caretaker of the Strategic National Stockpile, the U.S.’s reserve supply of drugs, vaccines and medical supplies that can be distributed to state and local health departments during times of overwhelming need. Its stores come in part from the resources developed by the Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, a program that helps private companies partner with the federal government to develop vaccines, drugs and other therapies used to respond to public health emergencies.
But the HHS reorganization proposes to remove BARDA from ASPR and relocate it to a newly created “Office of Healthy Futures.” BARDA would also merge with another agency that does related work, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
One former ASPR employee who didn’t wish to be named said splitting up the Strategic National Stockpile and BARDA is a bad idea because it will create a gap between the products the government’s manufacturing partners develop and the stockpile that procures those products.
“The products will still be developed, but the handoff from licensure to procurement is just going to be difficult, and you have two different organizations that might have different ideas about the products that need to be developed and stockpiled,” said the former ASPR employee. “That’s not good because they really need to work together.”
The former HHS official said they feared that the disruptions to BARDA would cause pharmaceutical companies to pull back from collaborations with the U.S. The Trump administration recently canceled contracts with several biotech companies that were developing new vaccine technologies through BARDA’s Project NextGen, and is reportedly “reevaluating” a $590 million contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine. Instead, HHS has redirected $500 million of BARDA Project NextGen funding to a vaccine platform championed by former NIH acting director Matthew Memoli and acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Jeffrey Taubenberger.
The result of these canceled contracts? “The U.S. will get left in the dust,” said the former HHS official. “It may mean that other countries will have needed countermeasures before the U.S. and will be better able to protect their populations than the U.S. can. And that would be a very uncomfortable situation for any president, as well as for the public.”
ASPR has already lost employees through the government-wide cuts to probationary personnel, and they’ve lost more in specific cuts to administrative staff. Several of the former agency staff who spoke to NOTUS said the proposed changes would have the opposite impact of what DOGE and Kennedy appeared to have in mind when making cuts to HHS.
“I would worry that it’s not going to be the most efficient use of the resources,” said the former ASPR employee. “We’re not going to have that best preparedness that we can possibly do with the resources when you have that disjointed organization within HHS.”
ASPR is also the U.S.’s main risk management agency for cybersecurity in the health care sector, which has become a major target of cyberattacks. O’Connell said she was concerned that with CDC being asked to focus solely on infectious disease response, some of ASPR’s less disease-focused capabilities might fall by the wayside.
“We’ve got these experts that live beyond infectious disease, and being slotted under CDC for infectious disease purposes, you’re losing a huge part of what ASPR brings to the table,” said O’Connell. “[The healthcare sector has] been through several major cyber security attacks, and everybody feels like we’re on the verge of another one and another one.”
All of the former ASPR and HHS employees who spoke to NOTUS said they worried that since ASPR isn’t as outward-facing as the other health agencies, it doesn’t have the same stakeholder support as the CDC or the NIH. After all, nobody wants to think they’ll be the one in a disaster.
“I worry that its absence will only be seen in those times when it’s needed,” said the former ASPR employee.
If nothing else, the Trump administration still seems to recognize the importance of preparing for disasters. On Monday, The White House declared this week, in advance of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August, National Hurricane Preparedness week.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.