‘Like a Hand Grasping’: Trump Appointees Describe the
Crushing of the C.D.C.
Kyle
McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, go public on the Trump
administration’s manipulation of the agency.
“Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging
won,” said Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
By Noah Weiland
- Dec. 16, 2020
ATLANTA — Kyle McGowan, a former chief
of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his deputy,
Amanda Campbell, were installed in 2018 as two of the youngest political
appointees in the history of the world’s premier public health agency, young
Republicans returning to their native Georgia to dream jobs.
But what they witnessed during the
coronavirus pandemic this year in the C.D.C.’s leadership suite on the 12-floor
headquarters here shook them: Washington’s dismissal of science, the White
House’s slow suffocation of the agency’s voice, the meddling in its messages
and the siphoning of its budget.
In a series of interviews, the pair has
decided to go public with their disillusionment: what went wrong, and what they
believe needs to be done as the agency girds for what could be a yearslong
project of rebuilding its credibility externally while easing ill feelings and
self-doubt internally.
“Everyone wants to
describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined. It
didn’t happen that way,” Mr. McGowan said. “It was more of like a hand grasping
something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that,
middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C.”
Last week, the editor in chief of the
C.D.C.’s flagship weekly disease outbreak reports — once considered untouchable
— told House Democrats investigating political interference in the agency’s
work that she was ordered to destroy an email showing Trump
appointees attempting to meddle with their publication.
The same day, the outlines of the
C.D.C.’s future took more shape when President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced a slate of health nominees, including Dr.
Rochelle Walensky, the chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General
Hospital, as the agency’s new director, a move generally greeted with
enthusiasm by public health experts.
“We are ready to combat this virus with
science and facts,” she wrote on Twitter.
Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell — who
joined the C.D.C. in their early 30s, then left together in August — said that
mantra was what was most needed after a brutal year that left the agency’s
authority crippled.
In November, Mr. McGowan held
conversations with Biden transition officials reviewing the agency’s response
to the pandemic, where he said he was candid about its failures. Among the
initiatives he encouraged the new administration to plan for: reviving regular
— if not daily — news briefings featuring the agency’s scientists.
Mr. McGowan and Ms.
Campbell, both 34, say they tried to protect their colleagues against political
meddling from the White House and Department of Health and Human Services. But
an agency created to protect the nation against a public health catastrophe
like the coronavirus was largely stifled by the Trump administration.
The White House insisted on reviewing —
and often softening — the C.D.C.’s closely guarded coronavirus guidance
documents, the most prominent public expression of its latest research and
scientific consensus on the spread of the virus. The documents were vetted not
only by the White House’s coronavirus task force but by what felt to the
agency’s employees like an endless loop of political appointees across
Washington.
Mr. McGowan recalled a White House
fixated on the economic implications of public health. He and Dr. Robert R.
Redfield, the C.D.C. director, negotiated with Russell T. Vought, the White
House budget director, over social distancing guidelines for restaurants, as
Mr. Vought argued that specific spacing recommendations would be too onerous
for businesses to enforce.
“It is not the C.D.C.’s role to
determine the economic viability of a guidance document,” Mr. McGowan said.
They compromised anyway, recommending
social distancing without a reference to the typical six-foot measurement.
One of Ms. Campbell’s responsibilities
was helping secure approval for the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Reports, a widely followed and otherwise apolitical guide on infectious disease
renowned in the medical community. Over the summer, political appointees at the
health department repeatedly asked C.D.C. officials to revise, delay and even scuttle drafts they
thought could be viewed, by implication, as criticism of President Trump.
“It wasn’t until something was in the
M.M.W.R. that was in contradiction to what message the White House and H.H.S.
were trying to put forward that they became scrutinized,” Ms. Campbell said.
Dr. Tom Frieden, the
C.D.C. director under President Barack Obama, said it was typical and
“legitimate” to have interagency process for review.
“What’s not legitimate is to overrule
science,” he said.
Often, Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell
mediated between Dr. Redfield and agency scientists when the White House’s
guidance requests and dictates would arrive: edits from Mr. Vought and
Kellyanne Conway, the former White House adviser, on choirs and communion in
faith communities, or suggestions from Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter
and aide, on schools.
“Every time that the science clashed
with the messaging, messaging won,” Mr. McGowan said.
Episodes of meddling sometimes turned
absurd, they said. In the spring, the C.D.C. published an app that allowed
Americans to screen themselves for symptoms of Covid-19. But the Trump
administration decided to develop a similar tool with Apple. White House
officials then demanded that the C.D.C. wipe its app off its website, Mr.
McGowan said.
Ms. Campbell said that at the
pandemic’s outset, she was confident the agency had the best scientists in the
world at its disposal, “just like we had in the past.”
“What was so different, though, was the
political involvement, not only from H.H.S. but then the White House,
ultimately, that in so many ways hampered what our scientists were able to do,”
she said.
Top C.D.C. officials devised
workarounds. Instead of posting new guidance for schools and election officials
in the spring, they published “updates” to previous guidance that skipped
formal review from Washington. That prompted officials in Washington to insist
on reviewing updates.
Brian Morgenstern, a White House
spokesman, said that “all proposed guidelines and regulations with potentially
sweeping effects on our economy, society and constitutional freedoms receive
appropriate consultation from all stakeholders, including task force doctors,
other experts and administration leaders.”
A C.D.C. spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. McGowan and Ms.
Campbell both attended the University of Georgia and saw their C.D.C. positions
as homecomings. Mr. McGowan said the two institutions he revered most during
his Georgia childhood were the C.D.C. and Coca-Cola.
He arrived with a résumé that made the
agency’s senior ranks suspicious, he said. Like Ms. Campbell, he worked for
former Representative Tom Price, first in his House office, then when he was
health secretary under Mr. Trump. When he arrived at the C.D.C., Mr. McGowan
told his new colleagues that he was there not to spy on or undermine them, but
to support them.
Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell, who have
since opened a health policy consulting firm, said they saw themselves as
keepers of the agency’s senior scientists, whose morale had been sapped. Dr.
Redfield, whose leadership has been criticized roundly by public health experts
and privately by his own scientists, was rarely in Atlanta, consumed by
Washington responsibilities.
That often left Mr. McGowan and Ms.
Campbell as the agency’s most senior political appointees in Atlanta — two of
only four at an 11,000-person agency.
Mr. McGowan, who talked to Dr. Redfield
throughout the day by phone, worked in the office next to Dr. Anne Schuchat, a
32-year career staff member who is the agency’s principal deputy director and
one of the country’s most respected scientists, and became a sounding board for
her.
Earlier this year, Dr. Schuchat
was targeted by political appointees at the health department,
who began interrogating C.D.C. officials about her public comments
acknowledging the seriousness of the pandemic. Dr. Schuchat asked Mr. McGowan whether she would be fired.
“I don’t know,” Mr.
McGowan recalled telling her. “Not yet.”
Mr. McGowan said he
was especially unnerved last winter when officials in Washington told the C.D.C.
that regular telephone briefings with another senior scientist, Dr. Nancy
Messonnier, were no longer needed because Mr. Trump had his own daily
briefings. Dr. Messonnier angered the White House in late
February when she issued a public warning that the virus was about to change
Americans’ lives.
“There’s not a single thing that she
said that didn’t come true,” Mr. McGowan said. “Is it more important to have
her telling the world and the American public what to be prepared for, or is it
just to say, ‘All is well?’”
“It’s demoralizing to spend your entire
career preparing for this moment, preparing for a pandemic like this. And then
not be able to fully do your job,” Mr. McGowan said. “They need to be allowed
to lead.”
Agency scientists have privately fretted about the pandemic permanently
damaging the C.D.C.’s authority, with the public as well as state and
international health partners. The C.D.C. was wounded by its initial struggles
to develop reliable tests for the coronavirus. Scientists have discussed
resigning, including some in the senior ranks who told Mr. McGowan that even
though they flirted with leaving, they would have a hard time walking away from
the agency at its lowest point.
Dr. Frieden said the agency had done “a
lot of good work that they haven’t been able to tell anyone about,” including
investigating outbreaks in prisons and meatpacking facilities. But he said its
leaders had to speak out more.
“C.D.C. has a big podium,” he said.
“You have to tell people what you know, when you know it. Otherwise you get a
lack of alignment. It’s not just the public. When you do those briefings, the
public health departments and the doctors also learn.”
This fall, senior C.D.C. officials
turned bolder. They resumed regular news media briefings by agency scientists.
Without seeking permission from Washington, they revised guidance documents on
schools and asymptomatic testing, health officials said.
Fears of mixing
politics and science linger, like when Vice President Mike Pence visited the
agency this month with Georgia’s Republican senators, who are in critical runoff campaigns. Dr. Jay Butler, a top agency
official, told a colleague that he worried that if Mr. Pence discussed the
campaign, C.D.C. employees at the event might violate the law prohibiting
federal workers from engaging in political activities on the job, according to
someone with knowledge of his concern. A White House lawyer wrote Dr. Butler to
say that the event was unrelated to a campaign stop later in the day, and would
not be political.
Among the obvious targets for reform is
the agency’s budget, which has been micromanaged, especially by Mark Meadows,
the White House chief of staff, who has argued against C.D.C. funds in
coronavirus stimulus negotiations.
Dr. Barry R. Bloom, an infectious
disease expert and public health professor at Harvard, said the C.D.C.’s money
problems could help explain its predicament. Unlike some federal health
agencies, such at the National Institutes of Health, the C.D.C. typically
receives what public health experts see as paltry funding — a reflection of its
often low-profile work.
“They track down everything from
pollution to outbreaks in prisons,” Dr. Bloom said. “That’s the daily work of
C.D.C. If it’s well done and tracked down, it will not appear in the pages of
your newspaper.”
The funding the C.D.C. did receive this
year was cannibalized. Dr. Redfield told lawmakers that $300 million was
steered from the C.D.C.’s budget to a vaccine public relations campaign
that recently collapsed under scrutiny from reporters
and lawmakers.
The redirecting of the funding was just
one more blow to an agency brought low by a pandemic it was alerted to only a
year ago. Mr. McGowan has held on to the email thread from Dec. 31, 2019, about
a “cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China,” a haunting artifact.
“Damage has been done to the C.D.C.
that will take years to undo,” he said. “And that’s terrible to hear, because
it happened under my time there.”
