The White House office for U.S. pandemic policy has been gutted
The White House office mandated by Congress to coordinate pandemic preparedness has been gutted, leaving urgent global health security gaps.
Six months into the second Trump administration, a critical piece of America’s pandemic defense infrastructure sits dormant. The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), created in 2022 by congressional mandate through the PREVENT Pandemics Act, has been effectively abandoned—operating without a director since Trump’s second inauguration. This institutional void emerges just as the United States faces escalating pandemic risks, from avian influenza jumping between species to climate-driven disease emergence.
The consequences extend far beyond domestic preparedness. As the world’s largest economy and a historic leader in global health security, the United States has internal weaknesses that reverberate internationally, undermining collective pandemic preparedness at a time when coordination has never been more essential.
The PREVENT Pandemics Act wasn’t a suggestion—Congress passed this statutory mandate with bipartisan support to ensure that the country would be better prepared, better coordinated, and more resilient when the next biological crisis occurs. The act required the White House to establish OPPR to serve as the central nervous system for pandemic readiness—integrating efforts across departments, bridging gaps in biosurveillance, and maintaining readiness through continued preparedness.
Under the Biden administration, OPPR grew into a functioning institution with a team of more than 20 experts. Retired Major General Paul Friedrichs and I led the office through its first chapter, strengthening the nation’s pandemic preparedness infrastructure. The office coordinated preparedness and outbreak response efforts across the federal government, integrated private-sector and community partners into preparedness and response, and led domestic responses to clade I mpox, Marburg virus disease, and avian influenza. [Continue reading…]