Cuts CDC’s drowning-prevention......... Why?

‘Terrifying’: Trump cuts CDC’s drowning-prevention team

The loss of the CDC’s drowning-prevention unit is one that water safety advocates fear will have a direct impact on children’s safety.

By Sophie Gardner

Water safety officials usually spend Memorial Day weekend warning families that more toddlers die from drowning than any other cause. This year, fewer people will know about the risk.

In April, President Donald Trump laid off the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for tracking and publicizing drownings. That team also worked with partners like the YMCA and the American Red Cross to get at-risk children into swimming lessons. That collaboration has halted.

The cuts come at a perilous moment. Drowning deaths rose during the pandemic, hitting 4,300 in 2023, the most recent data, compared to 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 — numbers published by the soon-to-be-terminated team.

“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.”

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.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the Trump administration was not ending its support for drowning prevention efforts and that HHS would continue to support them.

Besides the risk to toddlers, the report showed that drowning was one of the three leading causes of death by unintentional injury among people 5 to 34 years old. It also laid bare disparities in drowning deaths, with the highest rates among American Indian, Alaska Native and Black people.

Without the team’s data, federal officials, water safety experts and medical professionals told POLITICO they worry that key patterns in drowning deaths will go unnoticed. States continue to receive millions in CDC grants for water safety measures, but the agency’s leaders are telling staff to prepare for those to go away, too.

“We’re actively pulling away the lifelines and resources that we use to keep our kids safe, and that’s really terrifying,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of the Safe States Alliance, a non-profit association of injury and violence prevention professionals.

The loss of the drowning-prevention team is one that water safety advocates fear will have a direct impact on children’s safety. But it’s largely gone unaddressed by Democrats as they press Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on other cuts to his department.

At a Senate hearing on Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal Tuesday, Kennedy 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 was not asked specifically 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 about how HHS would support those efforts.

Some researchers have speculated that the increase is a result of the Covid-19 pandemic — when fewer lifeguards were on duty and swimming lessons weren’t available because of lockdown guidance — a theory that, without additional reports from the CDC, will remain untested. On Tuesday, Kennedy pointed to America’s poor health outcomes, despite Biden-era funding levels, as evidence to justify the proposed cuts.

But some of his own staffers disagree.

“The way that this was done means that there was 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.”

‘Our north star’

The national numbers, officials said, weren’t just used to get the public to pay attention. It also told entities that work on drowning prevention where to focus.

Hill told POLITICO that Chicago sees especially high drowning numbers because of its proximity to Lake Michigan — which was the site of more than 50 drowning deaths in 2024.

“We use [CDC data] to plan our own programming,” Hill told POLITICO, noting that without the reports, it will be more difficult to figure out how to “reach the right people.”

The CDC’s drowning team was part of the agency’s Injury Center, which lost about a third of its staff amid layoffs in April.

“CDC Injury Center is like our North Star in injury prevention,” said Hill, who also serves as director of unintentional injury prevention programs at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Trump’s budget request would nix the entire center — which also tracks domestic violence, suicides, car crashes and overdoses — labeling it one of several duplicative or unnecessary departments. Much of the center’s work on domestic violence tracking and prevention is mandated by law.

Grants at risk

As of mid-May, the funding that the center sends states to help them with their own drowning prevention work is still intact. But CDC leaders are warning, according to the CDC official, to plan for the grants to be eliminated as well.

“That is sort of another level of devastation,” the official said.

Ryan Greenstein, a water safety advocacy program manager at YMCA of Metro Atlanta, said that the YMCA gets money from CDC to fund its safety around water program and offer free survival classes in areas of the city where people are not likely to get swimming lessons.

Greenstein’s YMCA joined with Georgia’s other YMCAs last month to send a letter to the state’s congressional delegation, urging them to help reverse the cuts to the CDC’s drowning work and warning that, “without the data and best practices from the CDC Injury Center, Georgians are at increased risk of death” every time they swim in the state.

“And as far as anyone knows — including people who have been here much longer than me — that’s the first time we’ve ever done a letter, as an alliance, to Congress on a federal issue,” Greenstein told POLITICO. “This is a big issue for us.”

Hill noted that the lack of national data could inhibit localities ability to get grants for drowning prevention from outside the CDC as well, because “any grant that you write starts with the needs statement.”

Work in progress

Two CDC scientists, who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, detailed the drowning prevention work that was left unfinished when the drowning team was placed on administrative leave.

In addition to planning to update the agency’s website with more recent federal data on drowning deaths this spring, the team was also analyzing emergency department data to better understand the ramifications of non-fatal drowning.

The other scientist said that they had been close to publishing data on drowning deaths of children with autism spectrum disorder.

A project analyzing a novel data source to find out more information on drowning risk factors was about halfway done, and all of the team’s work with external partners — including the YMCA, American Red Cross, and Safe States Alliance — was abruptly halted.

“This work that we were doing to try and understand how to increase engagement among people who have higher rates of drowning — I think that might stop, and that’s really unfortunate, because those kids need swim lessons,” the first scientist said.