The agency has lost its independence and nearly a third of its staff, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and associates have tightened control.
Page H2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 26 September 2026
Times warns bill 'starting to bite' before midterms; CDC already lost a third of its staff.
As it ran on the front
CDC, Independence of; Died September 23–26, Cousin Agency to the National Institutes of Health, at Home in Atlanta
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's independence died this week, quietly, the way institutions do when the exits go unstaffed. Kennedy Jr. and the people he keeps close. The paper called the result "zombified." That is not the Times editorializing; that is the Times describing a body that still walks the halls without doing the job the halls were built for.…
…(cont) The independence did not die alone. Three days earlier, the same paper ran the same story under three near-identical headlines — "The Big Beautiful Bill Is Starting to Bite Before the Election," then "Before the Midterm Elections," then, simply, "Before the Election" — each one describing the tax cuts in the president's signature bill and the health care and food assistance the bill trimmed to help pay for them. Three headlines, one week, one sentence repeated like a hand checking a pulse that had already stopped. The bite the paper kept warning was on its way had, by the CDC's own staffing chart, already landed.
That is not coincidence, and it is not bunk either. An agency built to count disease honestly does not go quiet because of a virus; it goes quiet because the people who fund it decided honest counting was a line item. It isn't shit that plays well in a press release, but it is the plain fact underneath one: a third of the people who used to answer the phone when a state health department called about an outbreak no longer work there.
CDC's independence was born the first time a director told a White House the numbers weren't going to move to fit the message. It is survived by the two-thirds of the staff still filing in each morning to do the job with the lights partly off. It was preceded in death by the health coverage and food assistance the same bill was, three headlines running, still in the process of taking away.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the next headline about the bill's damage be the last one anyone needs to write, because Congress finally read the first three.
“They didn't lose a third of the CDC by accident — you don't misplace that many people, you decide you'd rather have fewer of them counting things. The Times had to run the same warning headline three times in one week just to get anybody's attention, and it's still buried below the fold. When the agency that's supposed to call an outbreak straight is down a third of its staff, the number you stop trusting next isn't in a poll, it's on the chart that used to keep your kid out of the hospital.”
“This is streamlining, not gutting — Secretary Kennedy inherited an agency full of redundant desks, and a leaner CDC responds faster, not slower. Sure, it's lost what, a third of its people, but that's efficiency finding the fat — okay, a third isn't fat, that's most of a building. Did I say "leaner"? That's not — that's not the line we're running this week.”
The receipts
The tax cuts in President Trump’s signature achievement were the Republicans’ answer to voters’ economic struggles, but its health care and food assistance cuts are taking a toll.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.