I’m a doctor. Trump’s cuts to the CDC are leaving us in the dark.

Americans will be less safe because of it.

I’m an internal medicine physician who focuses on treating infectious diseases. I live in Hawaii and am licensed and practice in 14 states across the Western United States. Because of the geographic footprint of my work, I rely on accurate, up-to-date infectious disease data. 

Like many other doctors in my field, I’ve depended for years on the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to provide real-time reports about what diseases are active in what regions. That information is paramount for doctors like me to successfully do our jobs.

For example, if the CDC tells me there’s an outbreak of influenza in Las Vegas, and a patient who just returned from the Strip walks into a clinic in San Francisco with a fever and body aches, I can reasonably suspect the flu over something like rhinovirus. This kind of geographic intelligence from the CDC is what allows physicians to identify, treat, and contain the spread of infections efficiently and accurately.

In short, this data helps us save lives.

Or rather—it helped us save lives. That changed the moment Donald Trump took office and installed unqualified political hacks to oversee the nation’s health infrastructure. For several months early in Trump’s term, CDC communication to physicians was completely shut down. And when it finally resumed, it was reduced to sporadic, filtered updates, stripped of the level of detail we used to rely on.

Doctors like me were flying blind. We couldn’t see the patterns, couldn’t track the spread of disease in real time. That not only made our jobs harder, but it also made Americans less safe.

To make it worse, the CDC is no longer allowed to communicate with the World Health Organization. That’s not just Trump posturing to appease his base: it directly impacts public safety. A person can be in the Democratic Republic of Congo today, land in New York tomorrow, and be in your hometown the next day. If there’s an outbreak of viral hemorrhagic fever in Central Africa, and the CDC can’t coordinate with the WHO to alert physicians in the US, then that patient could walk into an ER with no one prepared to recognize or treat what they have. That delay can—and will—cost lives.

Taking care of patients is not a partisan issue. It’s not about “big government” versus “small government.” It’s not a political football for Trump’s allies to kick around to score points on their enemies. It is about whether doctors can do their jobs and whether Americans can get the care they need. Without timely, detailed disease surveillance, we are diagnosing in the dark. And when we get it wrong, people don’t just get sicker. They die.

As if the damage to the CDC weren’t enough, Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his Health and Human Services Secretary has been catastrophic for public health. Kennedy, as everyone knows, has spent years attacking the safety of vaccines that protect against everything from measles to COVID. These are the vaccines I recommend every single day. Vaccines that have saved millions of lives. And now they’re being scaled back by an unqualified, conspiracy-peddling crank with no medical background but a famous last name. 

The damage to American healthcare isn’t abstract. It’s happening right now. It’s in the delayed diagnoses, the missed warnings, the rising outbreaks. It’s in the patients that I can’t help fast enough because I don’t have the data I used to have. Trump’s actions have tied physicians’ hands behind their backs. And it’s the American people who are paying the price.

Dr. Michael Patmas is an internal medicine physician, a former Trump voter, and a participant in Home of the Brave.