Trump Defunds CDC Drowning Prevention, Launches Exciting Initiative, 'Let’s Drown!'
Wasn't closing public pools to avoid integrating them enough?
In another of its stupid moves to make American life far worse in the name of “saving money,” the Trump administration back in April put a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drowning prevention program on hold, furloughing the entire team of health researchers and halting their work. Then in August, the researchers were all fired and the administration zeroed out the program’s $2 million annual budget in its request to Congress for the 2026 fiscal year that starts in October.
Jim Mercy, a CDC researcher who retired in 2023 and presumably can’t be punished for speaking out, told NPR, “If this program saved one life, it would be far more than the total cost of the program.” From an actuarial point of view, he’s right, since a human life in the USA is worth around $7.5 million, per a 2020 FEMA toolkit.
The US suffers a $50 billion economic hit from drownings every year, so as NPR notes, every drowning death that can be prevented is a pretty good bargain:
Drowning kills more than 4,000 people each year in the United States. It's the leading cause of death among children ages 1 to 4 and is one of the top causes of death among children ages 5 to 14. A single drowning costs millions of dollars in terms of medical costs and societal loss, Mercy says.
But with Jim retired, the CDC now has no Mercy, and for that matter, FEMA’s being slashed to next to nothing too. All the available data indicates that life is very cheap to the current regime. Let’s do a deep dive, as it were.
The CDC program that was deep-sixed by Trump was created fairly recently, following a surge in drowning deaths during the COVID pandemic.
“After the pandemic, quite a few organizations came together to drive some possibilities of federally focused work on drowning prevention,” says Lindsay Mondick, director of aquatic strategy and quality practices for the YMCA of the USA, and a longtime water safety advocate. “CDC was a natural fit — not only do they do data science, but they also look at intervention strategies and programs.”
Well there you have it: It was a Biden administration program, so it was automatically bad and socialist and had to die.
In addition to collecting data on when, where, and how drownings occur — don’t worry, it’ll never be released now, so you won’t have to be depressed by it — the CDC program also provided funding to provide free swimming lessons for kids at higher risk of drowning. Since that historically has included children in several minority groups and kids on the autism spectrum, that probably made the program illegal for promoting DEI and accessibility, both crimes now, just like planting trees in cities.
Shockingly, the Trump administration hasn’t yet eliminated this CDC page (here’s an archived version just in case) noting that the drowning rates for Black people are 1.5 times higher than for whites, while for Native American and Alaskan Native people under 30, the rate is double that of white folks in the same age range. What’s more, another dangerously woke DEI CDC report (and an archived version) from 2024 pointed out that there are big racial disparities in who learns to swim in the US:
Shockingly, that same CDC page even offers suggestions like “Make basic swimming and water safety skills training available and affordable for everyone in your community” and “Identify areas that don’t have safe places to swim or take swimming lessons. Build or revitalize pools in these areas.” Both of those would cost taxpayer money!!!!! Even worse is this recommendation, which must be thrown in a fire immediately: “Make it a priority to have diverse, equitable, culturally appropriate, and inclusive swimming and water safety skills training.” There goes Biden’s CDC, dragging race into everything!
While we haven’t (yet) found any angry Stephen Miller diatribes attacking the CDC for noting these specific statistical realities, they’d certainly fall under the umbrella of the regime’s crusade to uproot and eliminate all programs that “divide Americans by race, waste taxpayer dollars, and result in shameful discrimination.”
After all, remember the rightwing freakout when Pete Buttigieg pointed out, with complete historical accuracy, that much of US infrastructure policy in the 20th Century had the effect of wiping out cohesive minority communities? Or when Fox & Friends had a bigoted meltdown in 2013 over “sharia law” when a Minnesota YMCA had Muslim-women-only swim classes once per week? (Yay, we have that in Woke Boise, Idaho, too!)
When it comes to disparities in drowning deaths, the roots of the problem are even more openly documented, since city after city in postwar America shut down their public pools rather than face the horror of Black people swimming in the same water as white people. Hell, in the 1971 Palmer v. Thompson decision, the Supreme Court even ruled that it was constitutionally fine for the city of Jackson, Mississippi, to shut down all its public recreation facilities to prevent integrating them, because after all, it hurt both Black and white people equally. And unlike with public schools, there’s no right to swim in municipal pools, so cities didn’t have to reopen the pools. In many cases (and not only in the South), they were closed forever. Some were simply filled in and paved over.
Here’s a terribly America-hating history of the whole sordid history from the woke mob at Al Jazeera.
Apart from noting the data on racial disparities in drowning rates — which most stories do include — relatively few media outlets have come right out and said that the elimination of the CDC drowning prevention program is likely to have a disproportionate effect on Black and brown people. (Here’s a notable exception, from Word In Black.)
But make no mistake: While the CDC cuts will be bad for all Americans, it’s pretty goddamn obvious that Trump and his fellow ethnofascists won’t mind higher rates of drownings among minorities and disabled children. Making America inhospitable to anyone who isn’t white has always been part of the goal of drowning government in a bathtub.
[NPR / MSNBC / UC Law Journal / JSTOR / Word in Black]
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Attention, rest of the world: We're not waving over here.
Old story: I learned to swim when my dad threw me out of the boat. Wow! was that hard? No, Once I got out of the sack it was easy.