Journalists say a communications pause at federal health agencies has stymied the flow of crucial information and led to canceled interviews.
Since Jan. 21, staff at the Department of Health and Human Services — which includes key public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration — have largely stopped issuing routine reports and updating public communications channels at the order of the Trump administration. For some health and science journalists, that means losing access to vital public health updates and having sources back out of prescheduled interviews.
Kristina Fiore, the director of enterprise and investigative reporting at MedPage, said that while some of her reporters have gotten responses from press teams at the impacted agencies, they are generally short and lack detail. Follow-up questions go unresponded.
Fiore herself is working on a story about the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. An interview scheduled on Jan. 23 with the head of Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines, a public-private partnership that involved several HHS agencies, was canceled that morning. Fiore was told her source would not be available until February, when the communications pause is scheduled to end.
“We’re used to communicating pretty freely and openly with the HHS,” Fiore said. “So for them not to be able to speak with us, or for them to feel like they can’t say certain things to us, we’re just a little bit worried about that.
“… They’re taxpayer-funded and they exist to help distribute information about health to the entire country, and if they’re not talking to the press openly, that could have major impacts on the health of Americans.”
HHS is a massive department that affects many aspects of daily life, Association of Health Care Journalists president Felice Freyer said. One reporter might go to the FDA with questions about a new drug under consideration while another might need to talk to someone at the CDC about the latest in tobacco control. Yet another might need to contact the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for information about a state’s Medicaid program.
Some agencies have continued to send out occasional communications. The FDA, for example, issued a warning Jan. 22 about a drug used to treat multiple sclerosis. The pause allows for communications that “affect critical health, safety, environmental, financial, or national security functions.”
But “one big gaping hole” has been the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Fiore said. Until last week, the CDC had published the report every week for more than 60 years. The CDC was supposed to release several reports about the H5N1 bird flu outbreak, The Washington Post reported.
“It’s pretty much vital statistics and really important information about infectious disease and other public health concerns that comes out every week, and they stopped,” Fiore said. “It’s kind of chilling that they’re not allowing this kind of free flow of this very basic and important information.”
The HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond curtailing key public health information — such as drug recalls or updates on the current bird flu, RSV and norovirus outbreaks — the communications pause could prevent journalists (and the public) from staying updated on scientific research, said National Association of Science Writers executive director Tinsley Davis.
In addition to the communications pause, the Trump administration has banned travel for HHS employees. That means scientists at the HHS cannot attend conferences to present their research, and journalists covering those conferences won’t get access to those scientists, Davis said.
“A lot of science is done at the federal agency level,” Davis said. “And if the communication ban prevents scientists from putting their papers forward into say, the journal Nature, the journal Science, or any of these other journals, then that information is not getting to the journalists.”
Independent journalist Roxanne Nelson said that she had an interview scheduled with a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health to talk about a study she is covering for the American Journal of Medical Genetics. He canceled the interview on Jan. 23, citing the pause, and suggested she reach out to someone outside the federal workforce.
The cancellation surprised Nelson because she was asking him to comment on the study as a private scientist with expertise on the topic. “He was not speaking on behalf of NIH, and it (the story) had nothing to do with NIH, nothing to do with politics. … He was simply commenting on this paper.”
Communications pauses at federal agencies are not unprecedented, though multiple health reporters said they couldn’t recall a pause at HHS prior to the current one. In 2017, the Trump administration halted communications at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Department of the Interior shortly after it took over.
That pause was a “prelude to a bumpy four years” in terms of communications between the EPA and the press, said Tim Wheeler, who chairs the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Freedom of Information Task Force. Environmental journalists had had issues getting interviews with EPA scientists and officials under the Obama administration, but relations deteriorated under Trump.
“They (the EPA) actively pushed back against and even criticized press reports and individual journalists whose reporting they didn’t like or they thought was somehow unfair or slanted,” Wheeler said. “They tended to invite or uninvite or not invite journalists from news organizations with whom they thought were not being fair to them. So they would have a press briefing and not inform some reporters of them and send out advisories to selected media. … The pause was just the prelude in a way.”
The EPA underwent a partial communications “hold” this year when Trump took office, E&E News reported. The publication of press releases slowed significantly, and the agency’s social media accounts went silent for several days.
The EPA’s press office told Poynter Tuesday that there was not a pause on external communications, though it did not answer questions about when the hold had been lifted.
The pause in communications at the HHS is supposed to lift Feb. 1. Freyer said she is concerned about what will happen then: “Will we be getting the openness and transparency that the public deserves?”
Press advocacy groups are monitoring the situation. Lauren Harper, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy, said that if the pause extends beyond Feb. 1, there may be a lot more leaking to journalists. Even if it ends soon, the HHS might change in the way the EPA did after the 2017 pause. Harper noted that the first Trump administration executed what was “basically censorship of environmental websites,” affecting the availability of information about climate change.
The Trump administration has already removed a database from the Department of Justice’s website that contained information about criminal charges and convictions of Jan. 6 rioters. Once information is taken down, it is “incredibly difficult” to get it back online, Harper said. The first Trump administration eliminated nearly 40,000 datasets.
Independent journalist Mary Jacobs, who also had an interview canceled due to the HHS communications pause, said she sometimes references a database of studies that the NIH maintains for her reporting. She has already started downloading some information “just to be safe.”
Harper said she expects to see the Trump administration continue to restrict information, as he did during his first term.
“Government secrecy is a problem no matter who’s president. There are really big structural problems, particularly with the way that we handle data and classified national security information,” Harper said. “Trump’s team, whether by accident or intent, has just done a really good job figuring out how to exploit those loopholes.”
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