Trump Gutted the CDC and by July There’ll Be One Person Left to Handle a Rabies Crisis

By Rachel Hurley April 2nd, 2026 Updated October 1st, 2026

The agency that catches outbreaks before they start is running on fumes.

Welp. The CDC just stopped testing for rabies. Not because rabies is gone. Because there’s barely anyone left who knows how to do it.

On March 30, 2026, the CDC quietly updated its infectious disease test directory and pulled rabies and poxvirus testing from the list of services it provides to state and local health departments. The agency’s explanation, delivered by a government spokesman, was that this is “a routine review to uphold our commitment to high-quality laboratory testing.”

That is the kind of sentence that is technically words in an order.

What actually happened is this: the Trump administration spent all of 2025 firing people at the CDC - through layoffs, hiring freezes, and the kind of mass resignation that happens when you make it clear scientists aren’t welcome. Overall staffing fell somewhere between 20 and 25 percent. The poxvirus and rabies labs specifically lost about half their people, according to a coalition of current and former CDC workers. By July, according to internal documents obtained by the New York Times, the rabies team will be down to a single clinician-advisor. The pox team will have nobody.

Nobody.

An official told the Times the teams already can’t cover after-hours calls - the round-the-clock advisory support the CDC has long provided to states trying to figure out if someone who got bit by a bat last Tuesday needs treatment. Because rabies is nearly 100% fatal once symptoms start, but almost entirely preventable if you catch it in time.

The entire system depends on fast answers. About 100,000 Americans get the rabies shots after a possible exposure every year. The testing infrastructure is what makes those decisions possible.

And the CDC is the national reference laboratory for rabies. Some specialized state public health labs can help pick up the slack. But for patients suspected of having rabies, CDC guidance specifically says commercial laboratories should not be used. You cannot gut specialized public-health capacity and pretend there’s a substitute down the street.

Meanwhile, the agency has been without a permanent director since August 2025, when Susan Monarez was removed. The acting director right now is Jay Bhattacharya, who is also simultaneously running the National Institutes of Health, which is located hundreds of miles away from CDC headquarters in Atlanta. The proposed FY2026 budget would cut CDC funding by 42 percent.

The administration’s position is that the testing pause is temporary. They’re also proposing to cut almost half the agency’s budget, so I’d love to know what “temporary” means on their timeline.

The US is coming up on the 2026 World Cup, which is being hosted partly in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of international visitors. The kind of event where public health surveillance actually matters. The CDC’s infectious disease testing infrastructure - the one that catches the thing before it becomes the thing - is running on fumes, and by July it’ll have a one-person rabies team and a pox team of zero.

If a bat bites someone in Montana and the local health department needs a 2 a.m. consult, good luck.

Sources

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said about 60,000 Americans get treated for a possible rabies exposure every year - the CDC’s current figure is about 100,000 who get the shots, out of 1.4 million who see a doctor for a possible exposure.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so - the staff losses come from a coalition of current and former CDC workers, and the after-hours gap from an official who talked to the Times - and the title and closing now say the one-person rabies team is what’s expected by July. Two source links now point to working copies of the stories, and a dead one is gone.