GOP cuts could end CDC research on gun violence, opioid abuse, suicide

On Thursday, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Senate Democrats were likely to support the bill to keep the government open. Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff said Thursday they would not support the bill.

“The Trump Administration’s relentless and reckless campaign to undermine the CDC and America’s public health agencies put Georgians’ health at risk,” Sen. Ossoff told the AJC. “The House bill fails to impose any constraints on the Trump Administration, further empowering their reckless attacks on the CDC.”

In the 2024 federal budget, the CDC’s Injury Center received $761 million, according to the legislative text.

Credit: AJC

Credit: AJC

The full $761 million will be available if the Senate votes Friday to keep the government open by extending last year’s budget for several more weeks or months. But the decision to spend that money will be entirely up to the Trump administration. Democrats are worried that the bill as written would allow the money to be impounded.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the House Committee on Appropriations, said: “Funding for CDC would be allocated under 13 broad public health categories, ranging from $210 million to $1.4 billion, instead of being allocated to more than 130 public health programs and activities, specified by Congress, which would shift control over public health priorities from Congress to the Administration.”

Republicans, even hard-right conservatives who have opposed similar continuing resolutions in the past, supported the funding package backed by both House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump, the AJC reported earlier this week.

U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Athens, wrote on social media: “This will allow President Trump and his administration to continue delivering wins for the American people, including DOGE exposing and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Plus, President Trump has the constitutional power of impoundment — meaning he doesn’t have to spend every dollar that Congress appropriates.”

Last summer, a Republican-led House appropriations committee wrote it would cut the injury center’s funding to $40 million over concerns that the money could be better spent on core medical preparedness.

That proposal stalled, however, when Congress couldn’t agree on an omnibus, or detailed, budget in 2024, and used two continuing resolutions to extend government spending until this spring.

Credit: AJC

Credit: AJC

As the AJC has reported, over the last decade, Congressional Republicans and the National Rifle Association have charged that the CDC had strayed from its original mission when it began conducting research into deaths and injuries caused to Americans by firearms in the early 1990s.

Democrats say children dying from gun accidents and a generation of school shootings necessitated the research, and that using epidemiology science to evaluate the causes of gun violence has been shown to work. Quantifying or merely studying the issue was not tantamount to abrogating gun owners’ rights under the Second Amendment, they emphasized and wrote in opinion pieces published in the AJC and elsewhere.

In addition to the impact on public health in the U.S., any cuts to the CDC’s budget could impact Georgia’s economy. This week, consulting firms Guidehouse, Deloitte, and Fors Marsh began laying off Georgia-based consultants who worked with the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, the AJC has learned.

As of February 2025, the CDC had employed approximately 13,000 workers, most of them in Georgia. Several hundred were fired last month, but a final tally has not been released.

Dr. Mark Rosenberg, former assistant surgeon general and rear admiral in the United States Public Health Service, said the potential cuts would harm U.S. states, since 80% of the injury center’s money gets passed on local and state governments.

“When a school shooting takes place, it’s not blue kids or red kids being killed — it’s our children, our siblings, our neighbors,” said Rosenberg, who was also a previous director of the CDC’s Injury Center.

He continued: “When we started this work in 1983, there were 100 million guns in this country. Today, there are 400 million guns in this country. Things that we were able to do to prevent homicides against police offices and law enforcement when there were 100m guns do not work anymore in a context in which there are four times as many guns in the U.S.”

An AJC poll published in January showed that 51% of Georgia voters are “somewhat” or “very” worried that either they or someone in their family would be a victim in a mass shooting.

But while most Georgians (55%) say they think stricter gun laws would reduce mass shootings, only 28% said lawmakers should pass them. Instead, 58% say they want lawmakers to spend more money on school resource officers and metal detectors, the AJC reported.

Last year, 47,000 Americans were killed by guns. 60% of those gun deaths were suicides, according to Pew Research. In contrast, about 44,000 Americans die annually in road accidents, the CDC said.

Georgia and other states in the Southeast had the highest rates of gun deaths in the U.S., Pew found.

With reporting by Tia Mitchell and Ariel Hart