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Experts are worried that Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cuts on April 1 are bad news for reproductive health.
During layoffs of about 10,000 federal employees starting April 1, multiple outlets including NBC reported that most of the approximately 100 employees at the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health (DRH) had lost their jobs.
“It appears that anything having to do with women’s or reproductive health was particularly targeted in these cuts,” Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the nonprofit American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), told Healthcare Brew.
While 100 out of 10,000 might seem like a drop in the ocean, Tipton and others say this team is critical. The DRH collects and analyzes data on issues like maternal and infant mortality and lays out potential solutions, Lynn Yee, associate chief of maternal-fetal medicine for research at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Healthcare Brew.
“Without that data, we can’t have actionable change that improves the health of pregnant people,” Yee said. “Although maybe some members of the government might see data gathering as extraneous, it’s actually incredibly important.”
Legal, safety concerns
Staff from the DRH publish the US Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use, which gives guidance to clinicians on the safest and most dangerous contraceptive methods for people with different medical conditions.
“[Staff cuts] are directly affecting the information that’s available to clinical staff…I think that we will see the impact of this play out on direct patient care in the not-too-distant future,” Yee said.
The DRH’s full six-person Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) surveillance team was eliminated, and at least some of their work has been paused “indefinitely,” according to NBC. This team was responsible for tracking, analyzing, and publishing outcomes at all US facilities offering ART. This includes clinic-specific in vitro fertilization (IVF) pregnancy success rates.
This data has been used to build tools like the CDC’s IVF success estimator, where patients can enter their age, weight, height, and other characteristics to calculate their odds of conceiving successfully. Epidemiologists on the team also used this data when writing recommendations for how to improve treatment, Tipton said.
The department’s elimination is concerning legally because ART programs are mandated to report their outcomes by a 1992 federal statute, and the CDC is required to publish them, Tipton said.
An HHS spokesperson told Healthcare Brew “all statutorily required positions will remain intact, and as a result of the reorganization, will be better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent.” HHS is reducing redundancies, the spokesperson added, saying “this aligns with the president’s objective to enhance the operation of the federal government, ensuring continued support for programs like fertility research and IVF access.”
Portal problems
ART programs are still able to report the data to the CDC, despite the ART surveillance team’s elimination, via a web-based data collection system managed by statistical survey organization Westat.
The CDC has contracted this company to collect and validate this data since 2004, and its current contract lasts through Oct. 14, 2027, according to a government contract database.
However, without the CDC team, there no longer appears to be a clear way to analyze and publish the results. Plus, sometime after Trump took office, the data collection portal was down for “a week or two,” leaving clinics unable to comply with federal law, Tipton said—though it’s back up now.
Political pushback
A statement at the top of the system’s page reads: “Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11:59pm ET, February 14, 2025.”The statement goes on to say the Trump administration denounces “gender ideology” and concludes: “This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the administration and this department rejects it.”
HHS did not respond to an additional request for comment asking for more detail on why the site was temporarily taken down. But the language of the statement suggests it’s part of a wider crackdown from the Trump administration on “gender ideology” in government mandates, programs, and research.
The New York Times reported on Feb. 3, for instance, that the CDC had purged “thousands of pages” containing words like “pregnant person” in order to comply with an executive order barring gender ideology. The agency restored some of them in response to backlash.