What did Donald Trump do today?

He said that the COVID-19 pandemic never happened.

Today, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services stopped nearly $12 billion in grants to the states for disease prevention and control. Much of the money was being used to track, prevent, and control infectious diseases—such as the measles outbreak that started in Texas and is now spreading nationwide. (The Texas Health and Human Services Department is among the agencies affected.)

A statement from the department referenced the COVID-19 pandemic, a sensitive subject for Trump, and said that "HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago."

More than 1,200,000 Americans died as a result of the "non-existent" COVID-19 pandemic in just the first two years. Trump himself nearly died from it. Studies estimate that 40% of those deaths were avoidable but for Trump's policies, which treated it as a political crisis rather than a deadly infectious disease.

Trump also cut funds for state health programs that, at least in theory, he has no specific political agenda against, like mental health and substance abuse treatment. The official rationale is cost-cutting—that is, that the cost per American death or illness avoided by medical care is too high.

Trump's cuts to the IRS, also done in the name of cutting costs, are now expected to cost half a trillion dollars per year, mostly from extremely wealthy individuals and companies avoiding paying their share. That is about 42 times more than the cost of the medical services being cut today.

Why does this matter?

• Pretending that politically inconvenient infectious diseases don't exist was a bad strategy in 2020, and it is a bad strategy in 2025.

• Enabling tax cheats is a bad idea even when the president hasn't been repeatedly caught doing it himself.

• It is not a waste of money to keep Americans from getting sick.