The Trump administration has reportedly terminated members of a health committee that provides guidance on limiting the spread of diseases to government agencies and hospitals across the country.
According to its government website, the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee’s (HICPAC) primary aim is to “provide advice and guidance” to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and agency heads under their purview “regarding the practice of infection control and strategies for surveillance, prevention, and control of healthcare-associated infections antimicrobial resistance and related events in settings where healthcare is provided, including hospitals, outpatient settings, long-term care facilities, and home health agencies.”
Created in 1991, the committee has provided hundreds of guidelines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with 9 in 10 of those advisories having been adopted over the years.
HICPAC members meet around eight times per year to review and develop these recommendations, which are also adopted and followed by hospital systems across the U.S. The committee’s guidelines range from promoting actions as simple as handwashing to providing insights on the best practices available to prevent the spread of bacteria, viruses or diseases, including mask-wearing, for example.
But last week, the committee’s members were informed by the Trump administration that they were all being terminated as part of President Donald Trump’s larger calls to reduce federal workforce numbers. According to a report from NBC News, the members’ terminations were retroactive to March 31.
Prior to that action, multiple health associations had urged HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to keep HICPAC in place, warning him in a letter on March 26 of the repercussions of its dismantling. Health experts fear that, if the committee no longer functions, current health guidelines will remain frozen in place, unable to be amended when better practices are discovered or when a major health event occurs.
“People will be sort of flying by the seat of their pants” if that happens, said Connie Steed, who has served on HICPAC since 2023 and is a former president of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.
HICPAC’s demise will also erode transparency, depriving the public of the ability to see how these guidelines are developed and justified.
“Without HICPAC’s public meetings, there is no longer any public access to the process for drafting CDC guidance on infection control for health care settings,” Jane Thomason, the lead hygienist at National Nurses United, told NBC News. “This further undermines safety for patients, nurses, and other health care workers.”
Eric Feigl-Ding, a public health scientist and epidemiologist who is also the chief of the COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute, lamented the termination of HICPAC.
The committee “crafted national standards for hand-washing, mask-wearing and isolating sick patients that most U.S. hospitals follow,” Feigl-Ding recognized in a post on X. “The committee is now dead; long live hospital infections.”
In a Washington Post op-ed examining the greater need for transparency at HHS, Peter Lurie, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said that Kennedy was failing to deliver what he had promised.
When he took office, Lurie recalled, Kennedy vowed that the department would have “radical transparency” moving forward.
“Transparency programs have involved more public explanation of government action, quicker release of documents and databases, more opportunities for public comment, and an aversion to sudden, unexplained major changes in direction,” wrote Lurie. “In its conventional form, transparency operates neutrally, without regard to specific political objectives.”
“To date, Kennedy’s ‘radical transparency’ looks nothing like this,” Lurie concluded, noting that the health secretary has eliminated communications teams, ignored and delayed Freedom of Information Act requests, dismissed entire teams involved in major studies, and altered, delayed or quashed some of those studies altogether.
“With so much obfuscation and opacity at HHS, it has become crystal clear that ‘radical transparency’ is not about openness and engagement,” Lurie concluded in his op-ed, saying that, instead, Kennedy is focused on “pursuit of [his] own agenda.”
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