Up in Smoke: Is Punk’s HHS Quietly Sabotaging America’s Fight Against Tobacco?

Washington D.C. – For decades, the United States has waged a slow, hard-fought battle against the devastating toll of tobacco addiction, achieving significant progress in reducing smoking rates and protecting public health. This fight has always relied on dedicated federal expertise. Yet now, in a move that can only be described as bizarre and deeply alarming, President Punk’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—ironically, a champion of a “Make America Healthy Again” initiative—appears to be systematically dismantling the very federal programs at the heart of this effort. More than 80 public health organizations are sounding a desperate alarm, warning that these under-the-radar cuts threaten to reverse decades of progress and leave Americans, especially children, more vulnerable to the nation’s leading cause of preventable death.

The chopping block has fallen hard. According to a recent Bloomberg report and confirmed by health policy insiders, the entire Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been effectively gutted through the administration’s sweeping “reduction in force.” Simultaneously, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), the crucial body tasked with regulating the tobacco industry and its ever-evolving products, is also facing severe personnel cuts. These aren’t minor tweaks; they are the decimation of expert teams built over years to protect Americans.

In a sharply worded letter to Secretary Kennedy, a coalition including the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids voiced their profound concern. They argue these agencies are already stretched thin, and further layoffs will inevitably “derail efforts to remove unauthorized products and hold tobacco companies accountable.” This is particularly critical given the ongoing crisis of illegal, flavored e-cigarettes—many imported from China—flooding the U.S. market and addicting a new generation of young people. Some estimates suggest these unauthorized vapes now make up a staggering 70% of the market. How can a hobbled FDA possibly contend with such an onslaught?

What makes these cuts particularly baffling, and feeds the suspicion that this isn’t about responsible governance, is the funding mechanism for much of this work. As the public health groups highlighted, the FDA’s tobacco regulation is entirely funded by fees levied directly on the tobacco companies themselves. Therefore, personnel cuts at the CTP do not save any taxpayer money. This fact strips away any pretense of fiscal prudence, leading to the disturbing conclusion that these actions might be driven by something other than a desire for “efficiency” or to cut “wasteful” spending, as Secretary Kennedy has broadly claimed in justifying his departmental reorganizations.

The human cost of tobacco remains horrific. More than 480,000 Americans die each year from smoking and secondhand smoke exposure. Over 16 million are living with a tobacco-related illness. These aren’t just statistics; they are family members, friends, and colleagues whose lives are cut short or irrevocably damaged by products that these now-gutted federal programs were designed to combat.

When questioned about these specific cuts, Secretary Kennedy has reportedly not addressed how tobacco regulation will be effectively maintained. HHS has offered vague assurances that “the work of this program will continue,” without clarifying how that’s possible with significantly fewer expert staff. This opacity, coupled with Kennedy’s previous statements about the CDC suffering from “mission creep” and his plans to shift chronic disease oversight to a new, yet-to-be-fully-formed “Administration for a Healthy America,” leaves public health advocates deeply skeptical. It feels, as you suggested, like numbers are being cut “randomly without consideration of the critical work that they do.”

The timing is also perilous. With a new acting director, Bret Koplow, recently named at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, the agency needs strong leadership and full staffing to confront both the entrenched power of Big Tobacco and the new wave of illegal e-cigarette products. Instead, it faces decimation.

This under-the-radar dismantling of America’s anti-smoking infrastructure is more than just a bureaucratic reshuffle. It’s an abdication of a fundamental public health responsibility. It is an action so counterintuitive to any genuine effort to “Make America Healthy Again” that it borders on the incredulous. If the administration is serious about the health of its citizens, it must immediately reverse these dangerous cuts and explain how it intends to protect Americans from the predatory tactics of the tobacco and vaping industries. Anything less suggests a chilling indifference to the lives that will inevitably be lost or damaged as a direct consequence of this bizarre and irresponsible retreat in the war against tobacco.