Robert M. LaFollette School on North 9th Street in Milwaukee on Friday, March 14, 2025. The school will temporarily close due so lead hazards can be addressed.
What caused Milwaukee's school lead crisis?
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US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday that the federal government has “a team in Milwaukee” helping the city address a lead crisis in its schools. The city says that that’s not true and that it’s still not receiving requested aid from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s childhood lead poisoning experts to deal with the ongoing contamination.

During a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing to review the president’s HHS budget request for 2026, Kennedy fielded questions about programs and staff already slashed from federal health agencies.

CNN reported in April that the CDC had denied the city’s request for help with lead exposures in Milwaukee Public Schools’ aging buildings after the agency’s lead experts were swept up in widespread cuts at US health agencies. Kennedy and HHS have said that the government plans to continue the work of lead poisoning prevention and surveillance at the new Administration for a Healthy America, rather than the CDC.

The CDC’s experts have not been rehired.

“None have been rehired from our lead program or our division,” Dr. Erik Svendsen, who was director of the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, which oversaw the childhood lead program, told CNN on Tuesday.
In response to questions Tuesday from Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, about the demise of the CDC’s childhood lead poisoning prevention program, Kennedy said, “We are continuing to fund the program, and in Milwaukee, we have a team in Milwaukee, and we’re giving laboratory support to that, to the analytics in Milwaukee, and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee.”


Caroline Reinwald, a spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee Health Department, said Kennedy’s statement “is inaccurate.”

“The City of Milwaukee Health Department is not receiving any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the MPS lead hazard crisis. Our formal Epi Aid request was denied by the CDC,” she wrote in an email from CNN.

Reinwald said the department did recently get help from a lab technician from the CDC’s Laboratory Leadership Service, who was there from May 5 to May 16 to help calibrate a new instrument in the city’s laboratory.

“This support was requested independently of the MPS crisis and was part of a separate, pre-existing need to expand our lab’s long-term capacity for lead testing,” Reinwald said. Beyond the contamination in schools, the city has ongoing programs to test for and remediate lead in its aging homes.


Earlier this month, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Michael Totoraitis, if the agency had enough resources to accomplish what it needed to do.

“We have enough of a team right now,” Totoraitis said. “I think the long-term investigation into the potential chronic exposures of students at the districts is a part that we were really looking to the CDC to help us with, and unfortunately, HHS had laid off that entire team for childhood blood exposure.

“These are the best and brightest minds in these areas around lead poisoning, and now they’re gone.”
Andrew Nixon, director of communications for HHS, says the CDC is helping the Milwaukee health agency’s lab.


At the health department’s request, he said in a statement Tuesday, “CDC is assisting with validating new lab instrumentation used for environmental lead testing. Staff from [the Milwaukee lab] are focused on the lead response and other routine testing while CDC will assist with testing validation, laboratory quality management, and regulatory requirement documentation to onboard the new laboratory instrument.”

The city says that the CDC lab technician has left and is not expected to return. As of now, it doesn’t anticipate any further help from the CDC.

“MHD is proud of the team currently serving Milwaukee families, managing its regular caseload while also responding to the lead crisis in MPS schools. While we would have welcomed federal support, we continue to move forward without it,” Reinwald said in a statement.

At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, made a statement to “correct the record.”

“There are no staff on the ground deployed to Milwaukee to address the lead exposure of children in schools, and there are no staff left in that office at CDC, because they have all been fired,” Baldwin told Kennedy. “I look forward to working with you to reestablish that. It sounds like you have a commitment to that, but we need staff in order to make it function.”