White House to Cities: Good Luck Fighting Lead Poisoning

When Milwaukee officials discovered peeling lead paint in aging public schools last year, they turned to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch for help. But ink on the request filed in March wasn’t even dry when the agency’s lead poisoning prevention team was fired— victims of Trump administration budget cuts that have dismantled key public health protections across the country.

Now, the 36% Black city is scrambling to protect thousands of students, many of them in the more than 100 schools built before lead paint was banned. At one 130-year-old school, tests revealed dangerous lead levels, forcing a temporary closure. But without CDC support, Milwaukee has lost access to critical expertise, just as the full scope of the lead problem is becoming clear.

Indeed, public health professionals and advocates nationwide are sounding the alarm about how abrupt cuts to the CDC have already affected their efforts to protect children and families. The significant staff reduction means approximately 20% of CDC positions have been eliminated.

City officials also say losing CDC assistance means they’ve lost access to experts who helped track and address the long-term effects of lead exposure — and a whole host of other critical health issues.

The Trump administration’s cuts “have massively disrupted the work and projects already in place,” says Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition. “We’re not just talking about a loss of funding that endangers the country’s health, but also a loss of expertise across the federal health enterprise.”

Layers of Lead-Based Paint

In Cleveland, where 20% of children have elevated lead levels, Dave Margolius, director of the Cleveland Department of Public Health, say they’ve also lost CDC assistance for lead prevention.

“The percentage of children poisoned by lead in Cleveland is higher than Flint, Michigan was at its peak,” Margolius says.

The Flint Water Crisis began in 2014 when Flint’s city manager switched the city’s water supply to the Flint River, which corroded water pipes serving residents’ homes. The crisis exposed the entire city to lead poisoning.

RELATED: Flint Residents Still Waiting for Justice in Water Crisis Settlement

But in Cleveland, elevated lead levels are due to lead-based paint, Margolius says.

The U.S. banned lead-based paint in 1978 — nearly 70 years after France. In midwestern industrial cities like Cleveland and Milwaukee, where much of the housing predates that ban, “layers and layers of lead-based paint” coat walls, pipes, and windowsills, Margolius says. But “newer cities have many more homes that were built after 1978 and are not poisoning their children.”

The rates of lead exposure in Cleveland could potentially be even worse given lower rates of testing in the overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods on the city’s east side. But CDC assistance that would help test the city’s students ended in April when the agency’s entire team that handles lead poisoning prevention was cut.

Cleveland, whose population is almost 47% Black, also relied on the CDC’s help to reduce its smoking rate, which is three times higher than the national average.

“And so, these are our two greatest health challenges in the city of Cleveland, and there’s no way that we can tackle these problems alone,” Margolius says.

An Unprecedented Time for Public Health

The White House’s latest budget proposal would cut the CDC budget almost in half. The proposal also calls for merging programs that tackle infectious diseases, opioids, sexually transmitted infections and other areas into one grant program funded at $300 million.

“This is really an unprecedented time for public health in our country, and from what we understand, this was the first time in the last 75 years that the CDC has denied [this type of] request,” for help, Totoraitis says.

“Given the severity of our lead poisoning crisis in Cleveland, we need help from the Federal Government to accelerate ending the crisis,” Margolius says.

As federal help cities depended on disappears, Margolius wants to know who’s left to fix the lead problem the government ignored for generations.

“With the ending of the CDC’s program and threats to end the program, HUD, who can we turn to at the Federal Government to help solve this threat that was caused by decades of delay in banning lead-based paint?” he asks.

For now, the answer seems to be: no one.

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