rewrite this title White House Pandemic Office May Shrink Under Trump

The White House office in charge of preparing for the next pandemic is down a wide black-and-white checkerboard hallway in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Its windows look out across an alleyway toward the West Wing. In recent months, the staff there has been busy coordinating with state and federal agencies in response to the alarming spread of bird flu in the U.S., as the virus jumped from chickens and cows to farm workers.

By Inauguration Day on Monday, most of the pandemic office’s staff will have cleared out their desks. The office, officially known as the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, or OPPR, is losing more than half of its 18-person staff as the Biden Administration hands off the duties to a Trump Administration that has yet to fill multiple key pandemic-response positions, according to two Biden Administration officials. The political appointees in charge of the office—director Paul Friedrichs and deputy director Nikki Romanik—are leaving to make way for potential Trump appointments, and several of the office’s 14 career staffers, whose assignments to the White House office were temporary, are returning to their home agencies.

For months, health experts have been concerned about what Donald Trump’s victory would mean for the federal government’s pandemic planning apparatus. His pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic with a history of spreading false medical theories, as his health secretary has drawn the most attention. But the uncertain future of OPPR, which is seen by some as the tip of the spear of the federal government’s pandemic response, is also raising concerns. Trump’s transition team did not respond to multiple requests for comment about his plans for the pandemic office

Trump eliminated a similar White House office after he became president in 2017, a move that health experts argued contributed to the federal government’s erratic response in 2020 during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic widened that year, Trump claimed the virus would “go away without a vaccine” and suggested during a White House press briefing that the virus could be neutralized by injecting bleach.

Biden’s first executive order as president in 2021 restored the office, and Congress added more resources and formally named it the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. But Trump told TIME in April that he saw that office as a “way of giving out pork.” Asked if he would once again disband a pandemic office if he returned to the White House, Trump said, “Yeah, I probably would, because I think we’ve learned a lot and we can mobilize.”

Biden administration officials tell TIME they are concerned that Trump’s White House won’t invest enough time and energy into staving off the next pandemic. OPPR works to coordinate efforts across federal agencies and with state governments to ensure “no balls are dropped,” said a Biden administration official. “Not having a group that focuses on that would be a mistake.” 

The office cost about $2 million dollars to run last year, according to a Biden Administration official. Last year, Biden called on Congress to appropriate $6.2 million to beef up staffing in 2025. Since Congress formally authorized the current version of the office, Trump can’t completely eliminate it on his own, like he did in 2018. But he could starve it of resources and not name senior leaders to run it, which would tank its effectiveness.

Supporters of OPPR point to its work in recent months addressing the spread of a virulent strain of bird flu, which was first detected infecting U.S. dairy cattle in March. So far, the virus has primarily impacted workers in contact with animals and has not shown signs of spreading from human to human. But there have been at least 66 reported infections in humans in the U.S., most of them dairy workers. This month, the Louisiana Department of Health announced the first U.S. death from the virus—a 65-year-old man who was exposed to it by backyard birds.

As the bird flu cases have popped up in multiple states, the pandemic office has organized the federal response across multiple government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture. Friedrichs, OPPR’s outgoing director, said in a statement to TIME that the office “stood up—and continues to coordinate with—an interagency response team to protect public health, protect our Nation’s food supply, and monitor all trends to prevent the spread of avian flu.”

The federal response has included monitoring large farm operations for bird flu outbreaks,  reimbursing farmers for killing infected livestock to stop the spread, and sending protective gear to states where there have been outbreaks among livestock. OPPR also worked with states to expand the surveillance of batches of milk coming out of dairies, to help detect signs of infected cows. 

“While CDC reports that the risk to the general public is low, keeping communities healthy, safe, and informed remains a top and urgent priority,” Friedrichs said.

The White House’s pandemic office has also laid the groundwork for a vaccine response to a potential bird flu pandemic. It has overseen payments to pharmaceutical companies to stockpile millions more doses of the standard H5N1 vaccine in case it is needed, and has been working with Moderna to tee up an mRNA vaccine in case the virus mutates again and becomes more transmissible. “The outbreak only highlights the urgency for having an office like this,” said a pandemic expert familiar with the office’s bird flu preparations who requested anonymity to avoid running afoul of Trump officials who may think otherwise.

The White House office has also worked closely with other countries on the global response to outbreaks of the deadly Marburg virus, mpox, and Lassa Fever.

After Trump is sworn in as President on Monday, the OPPR office will continue to operate, but the kind of staffing and resources it will have remains unclear. Kelly Scully, a White House spokesperson, says preparing for biological threats that could lead to another pandemic was a top priority for the Biden Administration. It “should remain one for the health and safety of the American people,” she adds.