A pulse check on healthcare 100 days in

Fierce Healthcare – Wednesday, April 30, 2025
By Dave Muoio, Noah Tong, Emma Beavins, Anastassia Gliadkovskaya, Paige Minemyer, Heather Landi

The first months of President Donald Trump’s second term in office have brought a clear paradigm shift across healthcare—both inside and outside of the federal government.

Since his opening salvo of executive orders, the president and his administration have been pushing to overhaul the funding and oversight of care delivery. Mainstay health programs have been on the chopping block, international collaborations have been severed, public health research priorities have been shifted and non-government organizations supporting politically contentious services or practices have been outright targeted.

Not all of the changes have come straight from the Oval Office. High-profile allies and political appointees like Department of Government Efficiency architect Elon Musk and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have, with the president’s blessing, led unprecedented reorganizations of the government’s health workforce. Newly installed leadership across other agencies are also pushing forward deregulation initiatives and enforcement rollbacks sure to have ramifications for the competitive healthcare industry.

The execution of these efforts has sometimes been stymied, or at least slowed down, in the courts. Agencies seeking to execute the president’s orders have been challenged by those caught in the firing line—nonprofits, worker unions, liberal state attorneys general, provider groups and more.

Federal judges have so far issued dozens of temporary pauses on agency actions and even on specific provisions of the president’s executive orders as the court cases play out. In many cases, and sometimes to the consternation of those judges, that hasn’t kept the administration from seeking other avenues to pursue some of its most controversial goals.

The Trump administration touts its efforts in the past 100 days as “big wins.” “For too long, our health agencies have served the interests of powerful corporations rather than the American people,” RFK Jr. said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are beginning to rip the veil off decades of deceit, restore scientific integrity, and reclaim our birthright: a healthy, thriving nation. This is not just policy—it’s a revolution in public health. And it’s how we Make America Healthy Again.”

Public health officials, researchers, scientists and physicians, however, are sounding the alarm about actions that dismantle the foundations of public health and medical research. “You can’t have a healthy America without an attention to the preventive measures that actually keep people healthy,” said Wendy Armstrong, M.D., an infectious disease physician and vice president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in an interview with Fierce Healthcare.

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