The Trump Administration Has Halted The CDC's Drowning Prevention Program
Drowning is the number one cause of death for children between 1 and 4 years old.
The Trump administration has been extremely serious about cutting back government spending and increasing efficiency on the federal level. But as programs that save lives are cut, many wonder about the cost of reduced services, research, and support.
This is now the case with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) drowning prevention program. All experts working on this team were placed on administrative leave in April and fired this August — and the program as a whole is slated for elimination in the proposed 2026 budget.
"If this program saved one life, it would be far more than the total cost of the program," Jim Mercy, former director of the Division of Violence Prevention at the CDC, told NPR. "The irony is that these and other programs were cut under the motivation of creating greater efficiency."
The program employed three full-time experts and cost about $2 million per year to fund. For context, the cost of a single drowning, according to the CDC, can total $4 million when it comes to medical and societal losses. Overall, the CDC estimates that unintentional drownings cost the United States almost $50 billion per year.
Also, according to the CDC, every year in the United States, about 4,000 people drown, and drowning is the top cause of death for children from 1 to 4 years old.
An estimated 55 million Americans do not know how to swim, and drowning deaths are significantly more common for marginalized groups like African American, Hispanic, and Native American populations, as well as kids with disabilities and kids with autism.
The drowning prevention group was created by the CDC during the pandemic, when drowning deaths soared. The group studied which safety techniques worked and which didn’t while also funding swim lessons nationally for high-risk kids through partnerships with organizations like the YMCA. All of that has now stopped.
The future goal of the program was to develop evidence-based practices for lessons for high-risk groups of kids, like kids with autism, and then replicate those programs widely to prevent drowning on a national level. But now the experts, programs, research, and resources are gone.
We have to ask, yet again — is this really Making America Great Again?
