Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s radical reshaping of the Department of Health and Human Services isn’t just impacting the big-name agencies — it has the potential to sharply disrupt a little-known agency that plays an important role during natural disasters and public health crises.
Two former employees of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response and one former high-ranking HHS official told NOTUS that Kennedy’s HHS reorganization could fundamentally impede ASPR from carrying out its mission of preparing the federal government to respond to emergencies. The HHS reorganization plan that Kennedy proposed in March would demote ASPR from an independent agency to a subdivision of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The Secretary is losing the Swiss Army knife that he has, and he doesn’t know that he’s got this great capability, because the best I can tell, he hasn’t really had to use it,” said Dawn O’Connell, who served as assistant secretary of ASPR during the Biden administration, about the potential changes to ASPR. “But when you need it, when there’s a hurricane and hospitals are shut down, or when there’s a wildfire and families need to be reunited with their the ashes of their loved ones, when there’s an airplane crash, like there was in Washington a couple months ago, when there’s a pandemic or an infectious disease outbreak — that’s when you need us, and we’re ready.”