US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts, experts say

A previously undetected outbreak of Ebola is coursing through parts of central Africa, and the US appears to be doing little to help stop it, after massive cuts to global and domestic public health efforts. There is no cure and no vaccine for the rare Bundibugyo variant of Ebola, which has caused two outbreaks in recent decades. Health leaders and scientists are now racing to understand where the virus is spreading and attempting to stop it – but the US is notably absent in these efforts. In the past year, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dismantled, thousands of staff at US health agencies were laid off, communications stalled and key scientific research canceled. There are 482 suspected cases and about 116 deaths reported since April in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with two cases and one death in Uganda and potential spread to neighboring South Sudan. The outbreak “might have been going on for a few months”, said Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research. The outbreak was immediately declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), before even convening the committee that usually makes that determination. Officials say it may last for months. “The DRC is one of the most vulnerable health systems in the world, and was the second-biggest recipient of USAID funding,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University. The US withdrawal of funding with “zero notice” has been “disruptive to the country’s basic activities”, he said. US foreign assistance to the DRC dropped from $1.4bn in 2024 to $431m in 2025 and only $21m so far this year. Assistance to Uganda dropped from $674m to $377m in 2025 and a negative $1.2m so far in 2026. “It was pennies compared to what you get in return,” Andersen said of global health investments. It is far cheaper and easier to prevent and contain outbreaks than it is to respond to them, he said. With the US cutting off the first option, the second scenario will become increasingly common. The US also announced it would leave the WHO and end $130m in funding, which resulted in 2,371 lost jobs at the organization, Kavanagh said, calling the cuts a “self-inflicted wound that the administration has really brought on us”. This outbreak and response was “deeply foreseeable when you gut public health surveillance and you gut public health capacity”, Kavanagh added. “It’s not just that we’re leaving the table, we are completely cutting ourselves out of the conversation,” Andersen said. “We are upending the table.” The CDC has “always been the premier agency” when it comes to country-level leadership and played a key role as a partner “you could turn to”, Andersen said. But under the second Trump administration, Ebola response teams were suspended, and health centers and medical supplies – particularly crucial with a virus spread through touch, with supportive care the only treatment – were dramatically cut back. A world-class Ebola lab in Frederick, Maryland, with the Institutes of Health (NIH) was designed for exactly this scenario. The lab would normally be swinging into action, following up on research indicating monoclonal antibodies and a vaccine might be effective against this strain, possibly testing those treatments and vaccines, performing in-depth sequencing work on the samples shared during the outbreak. But that lab was shuttered last year, with staff laid off abruptly and their work – key for preventing and responding to outbreaks – ended with no notice. The website for the lab is still closed, indicating it has not been revived during this outbreak. Satish Pillai, an incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, said he “can’t speak” to the NIH lab when the Guardian asked about it in a press conference on Monday. Instead, Pillai said that the US is able to test for Ebola through its laboratory network, a comment unrelated to the Guardian’s questions. Because of layoffs, terminations and high-profile departures, key confirmed positions at US health agencies are vacant. Currently, the CDC has no director; there’s no US surgeon general; there’s no commissioner at the FDA. Officials say there are now between 25 and 30 staff in the DRC country office. The CDC is sending one more person, Pillai said, and other experts are available remotely. The DRC office suffered massive and sudden cuts when USAID was unexpectedly dissolved last year. employees sued the US government after they were abandoned and lost everything, with no jobs or options to evacuate from DRC, they said. “When those USAID stop-work orders came out, there was a whole series of people who were actively looking for spillover in the DRC and in Uganda,” Kavanagh said. “There were hundreds of health workers doing surveillance activities, and then, of course, you had the