The Trump administration has not staffed an office established by Congress to prepare the nation for future pandemics, according to three sources familiar with the situation.
The White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy was established by Congress in 2022 in response to mistakes that led to a flat-footed response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The office, called OPPR, once had a staff of about 20 people and was orchestrating the country’s response to bird flu and other threats until January 20, including hosting regular interagency meetings to share plans.
“We did it very much behind the scenes,” said Dr. Paul Friedrichs, a physician and retired Air Force major general who was director of OPPR during the Biden administration.
As of this this week, only one staffer will remain, and it’s unclear who that person reports to, according to a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share the information. OPPR’s pages have also been removed from the White House website.
The new administration has not halted the country’s response to bird flu completely, but recent agency announcements and interviews with government sources show its focus has changed. For example, a leading goal of the response now is to bring down egg prices, rather than tackling the spread of the virus or preparing for a worst-case scenario in which the virus mutates and spreads easily from person to person.
OPPR exists “in name only,” said a source familiar with the status of the office who worked inside the White House during the last administration. “It has fallen into the abyss.”
Trump downsizes pandemic planning
President Donald Trump disbanded a similar White House pandemic unit in 2018 and was heavily criticized for the move when Covid-19 hit the US.
Despite this, in an interview with Time magazine when he was campaigning in April, Trump said he thought he would disband OPPR if elected because it was expensive and potentially wasteful when pandemics are difficult to predict.
In reality, Friedrichs said, OPPR operated on a shoestring. The office was established without a budget. “That was one of the real challenges,” said Friedrichs, who was the office’s inaugural director.
Eventually, Congress was able to add money to the budget of the Executive Office of the President, but it wasn’t specifically designated for OPPR. Friedrichs said they estimated that if the office performed all the functions it had been assigned, it would cost about $6.8 million. That money was never appropriated by Congress, however, because the government has been functioning under a series of temporary stopgap measures called continuing resolutions since the office was created in 2022.
OPPR was staffed by people who were detailed, or assigned, to the office from other organizations, which agreed to continue paying their salary while they worked for OPPR. Nearly all have gone on to other opportunities, Friedrichs said.
On January 20, the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order that laid out the structure of his National Security Council, naming the director of the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy as having a seat on the council.
During the first few weeks of the administration, the White House quietly hired Dr. Gerald Parker, a veterinarian with a long history of government service and expertise in zoonotic diseases, or infections that can be transmitted from animals to people. His appointment was never formally announced but was reported in the media. Infectious disease experts praised the move to bring him into the administration.
Parker’s title is senior director for biosecurity and pandemic response. He sits on the National Security Council and has been attending meetings on bird flu, a source said.
The White House press office did not respond to a request to interview Parker and did not answer questions about Parker’s role or title, or whether his office has a budget or staff.
Friedrichs said he has not been able to meet with Parker since he was appointment and never had an opportunity to hand off OPPR’s work to him.
Over the year OPPR worked intensely on bird flu and other threats, Friedrichs said they created the infrastructure for the office and made detailed plans for how the US could work across agencies to respond quickly to an outbreak, called the Playbook for Biological Incident Response.
Friedrichs said they worked across many government agencies to gather best practices and lessons learned from past incident responses.
“Hopefully, that will allow future administrations to have all that in place for the first time,” he said.
OPPR’s H5N1 bird flu plans had been focused on infection surveillance and on safeguarding human and animal health, but the Trump administration seems ready to take a different approach.
“Now, there are economic policy considerations in the mix that wasn’t there before,” one source said.
In late February, US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the agency would spend $1 billion on a new strategy to combat avian flu and “deliver affordable eggs.”
Independent office vs. a seat on the council
Because OPPR was created by statute, Trump cannot wipe it out of existence completely.
“That’s been one of the big issues with so many of his executive orders, that he’s trying to undo what Congress has done,” said Lawrence Gostin, a distinguished professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “If Congress has set up an agency, he can’t dismantle it or transform it into another.”
But by not staffing or funding the office, Trump can greatly diminish its function and its influence, experts said.
The National Security Council has long had a position dedicated to pandemic preparedness and biological threats.
Dr. Raj Panjabi was senior director for global health security and biodefense on the NSC before OPPR was created. After OPPR began taking shape, he was tasked with global biosecurity at the NSC, while OPPR focused on domestic threats. He said the two offices worked closely together during the Biden administration.
Panjabi said there are some advantages to having pandemic preparedness within the NSC. One is that the NSC has a strong policy-making process, which makes it easier to get things done. Another is that members of NSC have access to a different computer system, which is sometimes necessary for navigating the complexities of the government.
“Now that it’s one person, in one office, I think that’s good,” said Panjabi, an associate physician in the division of global health equity at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, co-wrote the bill that created OPPR with former Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. She said the office was intended to be reportable to Congress.
“While President Trump cannot legally disband OPPR, as he has threatened to do, it is deeply concerning that he has moved the statutorily created OPPR into the NSC.
“As intended by law, OPPR is a separate, distinct office for a reason, which is especially relevant now as we are seeing outbreaks of measles, bird flu, and other serious and growing threats to public health,” Murray said. “This should be alarming to everyone.”
Pandemic planning with less transparency
When it was a standalone office in the White House, OPPR’s activities were more transparent. The office was subject to open records requests under the Federal Records Act, but records of the National Security Council are covered by the Presidential Records Act, which protects them from disclosure.
Friedrichs hosted regular interagency calls between the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the USDA, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Someone from the office of the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services would also attend.
Those meetings were held daily right after bird flu was first detected in dairy cattle in March 2024. They moved to three times a week and finally weekly by the end of the Biden administration.
“At the end of the day, bringing everybody together and having those meetings was incredibly important, so that we had a shared set of facts,” Friedrichs said. “When decisions were made, everyone understood why the decision was made, what facts were used to inform the decision.”
Some interagency meetings continue to be held about twice a month, one source said. It’s not clear who’s attending and which agencies are joining the calls.
HHS was also hosting regular news briefings on developments related to the outbreak, but there hasn’t been a briefing on bird flu since Trump took office.
Friedrichs said that in addition to standing up the office and developing a playbook for managing biological threats, the office spent $2.8 billion to fund a compensation program for dairy farmers and develop a milk testing program to spot new outbreaks, among other efforts.
The risk that bird flu poses to the general public is low, according to the CDC, but a major focus of OPPR’s efforts had been to ready the nation to respond in the event the virus changed or mutated enough to spread efficiently between people.
They had assembled subject-matter experts with the expertise needed to quickly spin up a response if the virus gained new abilities, including people with knowledge of supply chains, public health messaging, vaccine development and distribution. That’s all gone now, one expert said.
OPPR also coordinated with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and partners from industry to maintain therapeutics in the Strategic National Stockpile.
One of those efforts was to contract with Moderna to make a vaccine against H5N1, should it be needed. Moderna has completed early-stage studies of its vaccine, called mRNA-1018, and said it planned to present its finding at upcoming medical meeting.
In February, Bloomberg News reported that US health officials are reevaluating that $590 million contract.
“I’m very disappointed, candidly,” Friedrichs said. “One of the real challenges when a new pathogen emerges is that it takes time to produce therapeutics, and it takes time to produce vaccines.
“So we worked very closely with industry to try and find ways to fund research and clinical trials and make sure that we had a variety of options available if this virus became more dangerous,” he said. “Because we just don’t know what’s going to happen next with this virus.”