The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has rejected a request from health officials in Milwaukee for help with a lead poisoning investigation, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eliminated the agency's response team.
"I sincerely regret to inform you that due to the complete loss of our Lead Program, we will be unable to support you with this," Aaron Bernstein, director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, told city officials April 3 in an email obtained by CBS News.
Officials in Milwaukee and Wisconsin's state health department had formally requested the CDC's help on March 26, after many of the city's schools were found to have "significant lead hazards" exposing children. Federal experts were asked to help develop a strategy to test and triage Milwaukee public school students for lead poisoning, as well as help with outreach to the community.
"This only underscores the importance of the role local public health plays in protecting communities – and the challenges we now face without federal expertise to call on," Caroline Reinwald, a spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee Health Department, said in a statement to CBS News on Thursday.
Children exposed to lead can face serious harm to their brain and nervous system, including slowing their development and causing problems with their hearing and speech.
Most of Milwaukee's schools were built before 1978, local health officials said in their initial request to the CDC for help, before lead-based paint was banned in the U.S. Inspections of some schools has turned up "significant lead hazards," they said.
"These findings suggest contamination may be widespread in MPS schools and continued visual inspections are ongoing," they wrote.
Reinwald said local health departments rely on the CDC for help "with complex environmental investigations like ours." She also said Milwaukee's health department "remains committed to moving this work forward and finding solutions locally."
A CDC spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CDC's lead poisoning team was among several branches in the agency's National Center for Environmental Health that were eliminated by Kennedy on April 1, as part of sweeping Department of Health and Human Services layoffs. The environmental health center had also handled a variety of other issues like cruise ship outbreak investigations, which are now reeling from significant layoffs.
Beyond lead poisoning, now-eliminated teams had also housed the federal government's public health experts for helping local and state health departments respond to a range of other environmental emergencies, said CDC officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"All expertise related to radiological and nuclear threats is eliminated. All capacity for natural disasters response has been eliminated," agency officials said in a memo after the layoffs.
Health experts tasked with investigating cancer clusters, overseeing chemical weapons demolition and responding to toxic substance spills, like the 2023 East Palestine train derailment, were also cut, multiple officials said.
"It's extremely concerning that there's no one who is going to be responding," said one CDC official, who warned that recruiting expertise to respond to environmental health emergencies had long been challenging for the agency.
"You can't go find them on the street. They don't teach people this in college," the official said.
