AcademyHealth, the leading professional home for health services researchers and policy experts, is sounding the alarm over reports of major reductions in force (RIFs) at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) this past weekend. These cuts strike at the heart of the nation’s evidence infrastructure — the foundation of data that informs every major health decision made by federal, state, and local leaders.
NCHS collects and shares some of our nation's most important vital statistics: births, deaths, injuries and their causes, how many people have chronic disease, how we're aging, and whether we have access to safe and healthy food and nutrition.
“There is nothing partisan about collecting, maintaining, and disseminating health statistics,” said Aaron Carroll, president and CEO of AcademyHealth. “When we don’t have evidence for policy, policymakers are flying blind. We trade sight for conjecture. The capacity to collect, analyze, and share high-quality, nonpartisan data is essential to good governance, accountability, and the health of every community in this country.”
Recent NCHS reports illustrate what’s at stake:
- Drug Overdose Deaths: NCHS data shows these have increased nearly fivefold since 2003, evidence essential to tackling substance use and violence prevention.
- Rural Health Disparities: Infant mortality remains highest in rural counties and among Black mothers, pointing to where interventions are most urgently needed.
- Aging and Injury Prevention: Unintentional fall deaths among adults over age 85 have more than doubled since 2003, information vital to designing safer environments and preventive programs for older Americans.
- Food Safety and Nutrition: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data guides policymaking and regulations on food safety, dietary guidance, and nutrition research.
- Tracking Flu and Pneumonia: Weekly tracking record of flu and pneumonia deaths to identify troubling strains or outbreaks.
“These are not abstract statistics,” said Carroll. “They are the backbone of every effort to make our health system smarter, fairer, and more cost effective. Without this data, we won’t know whether policies are working or where they are not. Cuts like this represent an abrupt collapse in the nation’s health evidence infrastructure.”
AcademyHealth cautioned that the effects of these cuts will be long-lasting. Once expert teams in survey design, data governance, and statistical research are dismantled, decades of methodological knowledge are lost. That capacity cannot be rebuilt overnight and the resulting data gaps will ripple across the entire health policy ecosystem for years to come.
AcademyHealth urges Congress and the administration to act swiftly to preserve the nation’s ability to produce trustworthy, nonpartisan health statistics.
“The data collected by NCHS belong to the American people,” Carroll added. “Protecting them is not about politics, it’s about preserving the facts we all rely on to make decisions that affect lives, communities, and the economy.”