Secretary Kennedy: cuts at FDA, CDC will harm work on tobacco and chronic disease prevention
May 2025
Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) and over 80 organizations sent a letter to Department Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with concerns about how recent cutbacks at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will impact tobacco use prevention and cessation efforts.
Organizations that have joined this letter fear that the recent cutbacks at FDA and CDC will halt and even reverse the decades of progress our nation has made in reducing the use of lethal and addictive tobacco products at a time when public opinion polling shows widespread support for strong policies to address the impact of tobacco use in the United States.
Since taking office, Secretary Kennedy has expressed his determination to drastically reduce chronic disease rates. We applaud this sentiment and share this goal. We recognize, however, that any strategy focused on reducing chronic disease must address the use of tobacco products. Cigarette smoking is a primary driver of chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, COPD and diabetes. In fact, smoking is the top cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. and is responsible for 30% of all cancer deaths. Altogether, tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing over 490,000 Americans and costing the nation more than $600 billion each year, including over $240 billion in health care expenditures. More than 16 million Americans currently live with a tobacco-caused disease.
Administration officials also have placed a high priority on improving the health of the nation’s children. This goal will be severely undermined by the elimination of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) and personnel reductions that weaken FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP).
The deep personnel cuts at FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), including removing the CTP Director, the head of its Office of Science and elimination of its Office of Regulations, among other significant reductions-in force, have severely weakened CTP’s capacity to exercise its statutorily-mandated regulatory authority to protect the public from hazardous and highly addictive tobacco products. The announced personnel reductions at FDA cannot be justified as they apply to tobacco regulation, which is entirely funded by the levy of statutory user fees and not by taxpayer dollars. Simply put, even with these cuts, not a penny of taxpayer money is being saved.
The sharp reductions-in-force at CTP are likely to devastate FDA’s ability to protect our young people from these highly addictive, dangerous and, in many cases, illegal products.
We are equally concerned that the elimination of the Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) at CDC will have a profoundly negative impact on our nation’s efforts to reduce the death and disease caused by tobacco. It will make it more difficult to protect young people from e-cigarettes and other emerging threats. OSH staff worked with state and local health departments to identify and implement effective strategies to reduce youth e-cigarette use and assist youth who are addicted to nicotine, as well as conducting critical surveillance and research on youth tobacco product use, including the types of products used and patterns of use, information that is essential for understanding the scope of the problem and developing effective responses.
Further, the loss of OSH will eliminate the only dedicated source of funding for state tobacco control programs, reduce quitline and other services to help tobacco users to quit and end the highly successful media campaign, “Tips from Former Smokers.” This campaign, which launched in 2012, has helped approximately one million people quit smoking, prevented an estimated 129,100 smoking-related deaths and saved an estimated $7.3 billion in health care.
These cuts cannot be reconciled with the Administration’s stated objective of reducing the incidence of chronic disease.
We agree with the Administration’s stated objectives of reducing chronic disease and improving the health of our young people, and, therefore, we strongly urge Secretary Kennedy to reconsider these cutbacks at FDA and CDC and thereby ensure that our nation’s health agencies work effectively to prevent the egregious health harms of tobacco use.
