The Biden-era U.S. Education Department, under Secretary Miguel Cardona, endured more than its fair share of crises over the past four years.

Some were beyond the department’s control (COVID-19), while others were the result of its own decisions (the troubled rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA).

How well did the department handle those challenges?

NPR spoke with more than a dozen educators, researchers, advocates and policy experts, including two former U.S. secretaries of education, to find out how they would grade Biden’s Education Department.

The results varied depending on the politics of the evaluator, with conservatives being harsher in their assessments. But there was some agreement: for example, that Biden’s greatest success was in guiding schools out of the COVID-19 era. Most observers also agreed that, when it comes to education overall, Biden will most likely be remembered for a pair of high-profile failures: the FAFSA rollout and his unkept promise to provide broad student loan forgiveness.

The grades: No A’s, two F’s and a lot of in-between

Of the 14 experts NPR consulted for this wholly unscientific poll, the Biden administration got no A’s, a bunch of B’s, two hedgie B-/C+’s, two C’s, two D’s, two F’s and one “incomplete” for work left unfinished.

That averages out to be… pretty average, a C.

President Barack Obama’s last education secretary, John B. King Jr., gave Cardona and his team one of those B’s, “with still much to be determined because there are a number of things that are still being litigated [in the courts].” (More on that later.)

The “incomplete” came from Margaret Spellings, a former education secretary under President George W. Bush. “There’ve been some real misses, but also some room for praise.“

“I want to give them a C,” says Denise Forte, who runs the liberal-leaning Education Trust, though she makes clear, it’s not a C+.

The two most conservative experts on our panel were scathing.

“An F,” says Lindsey Burke, of the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. “There is just very little, if anything, you can point to in terms of success.”

“It’s hard for me to think how it could have gone worse,” says Rick Hess at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who likewise gives Biden an F.

Let’s start with the issue that most of our experts thought Biden handled well.

President Biden visits students at East End Elementary School, in North Plainfield, N.J., during the second year of the pandemic.

Evan Vucci/AP

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Evan Vucci/AP

Helping schools through the COVID-19 pandemic

When Biden was inaugurated, in January 2021, only about a third of K-12 students had returned to full, in-classroom instruction after widespread pandemic closures, according to Burbio, an organization that tracked pandemic-era schooling.

The nation’s schools were nearly a year into COVID’s unprecedented disruptions, and Congress, under President Donald Trump, had already voted to send them nearly $70 billion in relief to help districts reopen safely.

Just weeks after taking office, Biden pushed lawmakers to send even more money to schools, saying reopening “can only be achieved if Congress provides states and communities with the resources they need to get it done safely.”

On March 11, 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, sending schools another $122 billion and focusing it specifically in lower-income communities. This move offered a lifeline to many schools, and Congress included a requirement that local districts set aside at least 20% of their funding to pay for services to address pandemic-related learning loss.

“It was done efficiently. I think they rightly put a focus on learning loss and afterschool programs and intensive tutoring and those sorts of things that we know help students catch up,” says Spellings.

For King, the key to success wasn’t just those ARP dollars. “Secretary Cardona came in with the task of trying to make sure that kids got back in school and that educators could be hopeful again. And he was, in some ways, the exact right person.”

At the time, the debate over the return to school had become bitterly political, with then-President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pushinghard for schools to reopen, while teachers unions remained skeptical and, in some places, fiercely resistant.

King says Cardona, as a Democrat, former teacher and school administrator, used his credibility “to rally people around the return to school. … I think that was a great service to the country.”

Biden’s student loan accomplishments

The Biden education team’s other notable success may surprise you.

“Ironically, one of their successes,” says Karen McCarthy with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), “is in the area of loan forgiveness. And I feel like, to a lot of other people, they see loan forgiveness as one of [Biden’s] failures.”

McCarthy is one of several experts in our poll to highlight that Biden pursued two different strategies to achieve federal student loan forgiveness: an ambitious, high-profile strategy that failed (more on that in a minute) and a lower-profile, bureaucratic strategy that succeeded.

The strategy that worked was to focus on improving pre-existing forgiveness programs that Congress had already created, including one for borrowers who work a decade in public service and another that promised relief for borrowers with a severe disability.

When Biden was elected, both programs were difficult to navigate, with thousands of qualified borrowers left on the outside looking in because of technicalities and mismanagement by loan servicers and the Education Department itself.

Cardona and his team expanded the rules of Public Service Loan Forgiveness, streamlined the “Total and Permanent Disability Discharge” program, expanded forgiveness for borrowers who had been defrauded by their colleges and even provided forgiveness to thousands of borrowers who had been hurt or held back by problems with income-driven repayment.

Even the conservatives in our poll conceded that, while they didn’t support these forgiveness efforts, the changes were arguably within the president’s power – certainly compared to Biden’s other, larger loan forgiveness efforts.

On its way out this week, the Biden administration announced that it has approved roughly $180 billion in debt relief for more than 5 million borrowers – “there is no comparison with any other administration,” Cardona told NPR in an exit interview.

“One in eight people with student loan debt have had it relieved. One in eight,” Cardona said.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona looks on in October 2022 as President Biden delivers remarks about the online portal for his first, big student debt relief effort – an effort that was ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

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Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

The problem for Biden and his education legacy is that he had promised to do far more.

The student loan forgiveness failures 

“The student loan forgiveness stuff has been a mess,” says former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings when asked about Biden’s sweeping efforts to provide at least some forgiveness to most borrowers.

There was the first, big plan, to erase $10,000 to $20,000 in debt for most borrowers. That one was nixed by a Supreme Court that chided Biden for executive overreach.

Biden’s Plan B, which would have helped a smaller pool of borrowers, was also challenged in court and, last month, abandoned by the administration.

And then there’s Biden’s loan repayment plan, known as the SAVE plan. It was so forgiving, it rivaled the price tag of his original forgiveness pitch, though SAVE is also now frozen in the courts, again over fears of executive overreach. If it’s not scuttled by a judge’s order, it will likely be shelved by the Republican-held Congress or the new Trump administration.

The Biden administration spent an enormous amount of time, money and human capital creating these three loan forgiveness schemes, attempting to implement them and then defending their legality in court. And for their considerable efforts, they went 0 for 3. Whether you see that as a failure of Biden’s team likely depends on your politics.

Forte, at EdTrust, argues “it was the right thing to focus on.” After all, she says, “the amount of debt that students are carrying, particularly students of color, students from low-income communities, is preventing them from reaching the American dream that everybody deserves.”

On the other hand, Lindsey Burke, who wrote the education platform for Project 2025, says Biden’s most ambitious efforts were legally dubious and “have been slapped down by the courts. So that’s a failure. It should have never happened. Student loan cancellation is bad policy, but it’s a failure in terms of the Biden administration’s ability to advance its agenda.”

In that failure, former Education Secretary John B. King Jr. sees an important lesson for future administrations, who “are going to have to spend a lot more time thinking through, ‘Where can we legislate [with Congress] rather than assuming that executive action is going to survive legal challenge?’ “

In his last week on the job, Cardona insisted to NPR that he believed he had the legal authority to forgive student loans on a grand scale, even if the courts ultimately disagreed.

Miguel Cardona listens during his Capitol Hill confirmation hearing February 2021.

Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times via AP

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Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times via AP

“I’d rather fight to do as much as possible and get shot down than not fight at all,” Cardona said.

The problem with these high-profile loan forgiveness fights is that they required enormous amounts of time, money and expertise and, according to many on our expert panel, arguably hampered the Education Department’s ability to do other things.

Two years ago, NPR reported that the White House’s unwillingness to limit its loan forgiveness efforts led to a political impasse over funding the office of Federal Student Aid.

The result: The office tasked with managing the return to student loan repayment after a long pandemic pause, as well as the rollout of an overhauled FAFSA, was flat-funded for 2023.

That flat-funding no doubt contributed to the Biden education team’s subsequent struggles.

Experts agree: FAFSA was the greatest failure

More than 17 million current and aspiring college students fill out the FAFSA each year in order to qualify for student loans, grants and more. For many, the form is nothing short of a bridge between students’ hopes and dreams, and college. In late 2023, that FAFSA bridge collapsed.

The short version of this story is that, in 2020, Congress voted to make the FAFSA easier to complete, but that required the U.S. Department of Education to overhaul the online form – and the launch of that new form did not go well.

“My gosh, that was so bad,” says McCarthy, whose group, NASFAA, represents college financial aid administrators. “The FAFSA is normally up by October, and really nobody could start filling it out until January.”

There wasn’t just one problem with the rollout – there were many. (The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office has outlined them in detail.)

Ashton Spatz, center, a financial aid adviser with the University of Illinois at Chicago, assists Jessena Sanchez, left, and her daughter, Leslie Delve, a sophomore at UIC, during a FAFSA workshop in February 2024.

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Vincent Alban/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

McCarthy says those problems resulted in the department taking months longer than usual to send students’ financial aid information on to schools. “It really is quite amazing that students got aid packages and enrolled in the fall.”

Nearly everyone NPR spoke with about President Biden’s Education Department said the FAFSA was its greatest failure and most think it will likely define Biden’s education legacy.

To Spellings, a former Republican education secretary, the FAFSA debacle was “a huge miss and has residual consequences, now and into the future. It was really a big fail.”

King, a former Democratic education secretary, agrees, saying “the FAFSA debacle, and that’s what we have to call it, set us back.”

Those who previously ran or worked at the Education Department, including Spellings, King and Denise Forte, now with EdTrust, all expressed some sympathy for department staff and the technological challenges the FAFSA overhaul presented.

“I’m not going to disparage the folks that are over at the department. I worked at the Department of Education. Career folks are amazing,” Forte says. “[FAFSA] was a huge, huge undertaking.”

But like everyone we spoke with, Forte says the department should have done better. “All you had to do was look at Healthcare.gov and know that we should have been dotting i’s and crossing t’s on this rollout. And that unfortunately didn’t happen.”

In his exit interview with NPR, Cardona acknowledged “delays and errors” were “frustrating for students and families,” but he was also defiant, insisting that the task of revamping the FAFSA was Herculean and the struggles should not define Biden’s legacy.

“More students every year will have access to federal dollars… because of the work that happened during the Biden administration. And it meant we took some bruises and we learned the hard way on certain things. But the system is better now for the next generation because of the work that we did.”

The latest FAFSA launched smoothly late last year, and Cardona says the department has already processed 4 million applications.

The slide in student achievement under Biden

In spite of the flood of federal dollars schools received through the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic triggered an alarming slide in K-12 student achievement.

Many of the experts who spoke with NPR worry that the funding law’s 20% requirement around learning loss was too low, that the money didn’t buy as much learning as it could have. And they worry that the nation’s schools aren’t likely to see so much funding again anytime soon.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, the average reading score for 13-year-olds in 2023 fell, compared to 2020 – to its lowest point in 50 years.

Math scores for 9- and 13-year-olds have both fallen considerably since 2020.

There was some hope, in the early days of the pandemic recovery, that those $190 billion in extra federal funding would help schools pay for interventions that could make up for learning missed during the pandemic and maybe even reverse this slide in achievement.

That did not happen.

Research shows the money did help students catch up, somewhat. But learning gaps remain.

“I mean, this will be with these students for years to come. It will affect a generation of kids,” says Heritage’s Lindsey Burke.

Hess was one of several experts who said he would have liked to have seen Cardona and his team bring more attention to these declines, even if it’s uncomfortable. “I mean, if Cardona or Biden spent any time talking about academic achievement, I think I missed it.“

Nearly everyone we spoke with believes these achievement declines need more attention.

“We need to get reading and math focused on, attended to, make folks accountable for it and get back to basics,” Spellings says.

Forte agrees. “Because the pendulum has swung the wrong way in many places.”

“I’ll never be satisfied with the growth,” Cardona told NPR this week, “because I know the potential in our country. But I am proud of the work that our educators have done, and I know that we’re moving in the right direction.”

In the end, the Biden education team inherited two crises (pandemic school closures and sliding student achievement) and created another (FAFSA).

They erased the federal student loan debts of more than five million borrowers, but many more will remember not getting the loan forgiveness Biden promised in August 2022. Whether they blame that failure on his education team or on Republican opponents who used the courts to torpedo Biden’s biggest plans, only time will tell.

We’re following the confirmation hearings for the incoming Trump administration. See our full politics coverage, and follow NPR’s Trump’s Terms podcast or sign up for our Politics newsletter to stay up to date.

Who: Doug Burgum

Nominated for: Secretary of the Interior

You might know him from: The 2024 Republican presidential primary. The former governor of North Dakota ran on his experience as a successful businessman before dropping out of the primary and becoming a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, then the front-runner, landing on the VP shortlist.

More about Burgum:

• He sold his software company to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 billion. 
• He is a big booster of oil and gas drilling. 
• He pledged for North Dakota to be carbon neutral by 2030, largely through carbon capture and storage. 

Position: The Department of the Interior oversees public and federal lands and their natural resources, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

If confirmed as secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum would become a key player in implementing one of the Trump administration’s overarching goals: “Drill, baby, drill.”

The Department of the Interior manages roughly one-fifth of the lands and waters of the United States, giving Burgum — the former governor of an oil-rich state — significant leverage to increase domestic oil and gas production, which is already at an all-time high. But the massive department also oversees national parks and monuments, endangered species protections and relations with federally recognized Native American tribes.

During the first Trump administration, the Department of the Interior cut regulations to make it easier to drill on federal land, significantly weakened the power and scope of the Endangered Species Act and shrunk two national monuments. Deb Haaland, secretary of the Interior during the Biden administration, reversed many of these actions and focused on boosting conservation and renewable energy.

Burgum is expected to reverse course again. Burgum’s pro-drilling stance is fairly well established, and as Trump’s proposed head of the newly proposed National Energy Council — a body that will oversee regulatory processes across government agencies — he’d have considerable power to push fossil fuel extraction.

His views on conservation issues are murkier.

His confirmation hearing, set for Thursday at 10 a.m. EST, could provide a clearer sense of his priorities.

Before jumping into politics for his 2016 governor run, Burgum worked as a software executive. In 2001, he sold his company, Great Plains Software, to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. As governor, he presided over record oil production in North Dakota, though most of this occurred on private, not public, lands. He also pledged to make North Dakota carbon neutral by 2030, largely through carbon capture and storage, not a dramatic increase in renewables.

Burgum will likely face questions from senators about privatizing public land for drilling. Federal lands currently account for roughly one-quarter of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, and dramatically boosting fossil fuel production there could increase climate-warming gases.

On the conservation front, Burgum could be asked about whether he’d support weakening the Endangered Species Act, shrinking or eliminating national monuments established by the Biden administration, and drilling in sensitive areas, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

He is expected to be confirmed.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said a cabinet meeting that was scheduled to vote Thursday on the peace deal between Israel and Hamas has been delayed, in a blow to hopes that a ceasefire after 15 months of fighting would take effect Sunday.

Netanyahu said that the meeting will only happen once Hamas pulls back on demands for what he called “last minute concession,” adding in a statement that “Hamas reneges on parts of the agreement reached with the mediators.”

He said that until the mediators notify Israel that “all elements of the agreement” have been accepted, the cabinet meeting would not proceed. He did not specify what elements of the deal Hamas had reneged on.

But in an interview with Al-Arabi TV, a senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said there was no basis to claims by Netanyahu that Hamas was retracting parts of the ceasefire agreement.

Another member of Hamas’ political wing, Izzat al-Rishq, said in a statement that Hamas was “committed to the ceasefire agreement, which was announced by the mediators.”

Netanyahu had called President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump to thank them for their help in reaching the deal late Wednesday. But he has simultaneously faced significant domestic political pressure from right-wing members of his coalition government, who have long opposed any kind of deal with Hamas – even though it would lead to the return of dozens of Israelis held captive inside Gaza since October 2023.

Several members of the coalition have repeatedly threatened to abandon the coalition if a deal was finalized – a move that would likely prompt the dissolution of Netanyahu’s current government.

But several more moderate members of Netanyahu’s cabinet said publicly on Wednesday that all their fellow ministers should vote for the deal, as has the country’s president, Isaac Herzog.

In the hours since the deal was announced by U.S. and Qatari officials, 73 people have been killed by Israeli forces and more than 230 injured, according to Hamas-controlled emergency rescue authorities in Gaza, with airstrikes continuing overnight into Thursday morning.

The war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel from Gaza, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages into Gaza.

The war has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, who said the majority were women and children. The Israeli military says 405 of its soldiers have been killed in fighting since it invaded Gaza.

Bird flu’s unprecedented spread among livestock and other mammals in the U.S. has raised fears that another pandemic could be in store.

The incoming Trump administration will have to prepare for this risk. As H5N1 spills into more people and animals, scientists warn it could evolve to better infect humans and become more dangerous.

Trump and his picks to helm federal health agencies have largely been silent on bird flu. The messaging so far — and the track record of those Trump has chosen to oversee a potential bird flu crisis — is “worrisome,” says Dr. Andrew Pavia, professor of medicine at the University of Utah who’s worked on influenza pandemic preparedness for more than two decades.

The transition team did not respond to NPR’s request for comment on its plans.

Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr., has an extensive history of making inaccurate and misleading statements on vaccines and infectious diseases. He’s a lawyer who for years led an advocacy group that is a major player in the anti-vaccine movement, promoting the long-debunked idea that vaccines lead to autism, among other false claims.

Kennedy denies spreading misinformation, though his criticism of vaccines is well known.

He’s also made specific comments undermining trust in the bird flu vaccines. In an online post last summer, he claimed there’s “no evidence” the shots in the federal stockpile will work and that they “appear dangerous.”

And he suggested in another post that “someone” might bioengineer a dangerous form of the virus to profit off the vaccine.

Scientists who study the vaccines are deeply troubled by these statements.

“They are false, baseless and inaccurate,” says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Kennedy has also discussed having the National Institutes of Health take a break from infectious disease research for eight years, and replacing hundreds of employees there.

Trump himself suggested last spring that he’d like to disband an office in the executive branch that handles pandemics.

If confirmed as health secretary, Kennedy would have broad powers. He could declare a public health emergency, control and direct funding, and influence key decisions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and NIH, all of which are overseen by HHS.

“At every step, he can certainly play a role in hampering or being a barrier,” says Syra Madad, director of the special pathogens program at NYC Health + Hospitals.

This could be of huge consequence for how prepared the country is to face an escalating crisis. Still, some scientists point to the first Trump administration’s speedy work on a COVID-19 vaccine with Operation Warp Speed, and say they think that ultimately Kennedy would listen to Trump if he called for a similar effort.

“If the president tells him to do something, I would hope that would be the case,” says Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor of medicine at Emory University. “And let’s be honest, there has been a lot of failure in the current response.”

In the current U.S. outbreak, bird flu has been found in 925 dairy herds in 16 states, as well as in poultry, pets and wild birds and mammals.

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Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

An urgent need to prepare

Bird flu currently doesn’t pose an imminent threat to the American public — most of the 66 human cases since last April have only led to mild illness and were caused by direct exposure to infected animals.

But, scientists caution, things could change quickly.

“This is like some brush burning around your house,” says Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician at Georgetown University and a former FDA official.

“You better pay attention because it could turn into something else.”

To prepare for this threat, the U.S. must strengthen the pipeline of vaccines and treatments for bird flu, says Pavia. The Trump administration will need to bolster supplies of the existing shots and support development of new ones.

“We are fooling ourselves that we have enough vaccine capacity and the ability to respond quickly,” he warns.

Already under the Biden administration, scientists have criticized the federal government for the slow pace of its response.

“There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, who directs the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, adding that it’s not like “handing over the keys to the car with the engine running.”

Two weeks ago — more than nine months after the outbreak was first detected in cattle — health officials announced an investment of more than $300 million into pandemic readiness for bird flu. It wasn’t until December that the federal government took key steps to track the spread in dairy cattle.

“We’re flying blind just like we did during COVID-19,” says Madad.

Alongside vaccines, public health experts have outlined a list of urgent tasks to battle bird flu, including: working with the industry to improve biosecurity measures and testing on farms; coordinating with state and local authorities on the ground; and planning for contingencies.

There are gaps in disease surveillance efforts on farms. And ultimately public health agencies have limited authority in this area, says Dr. Luciana Borio who served as the FDA’s chief acting scientist from 2015 to 2017 and is now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“That means we have to put even more effort into developing new vaccines and therapeutics more quickly,” she says. “We can’t just hope that this is going to go away.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture in December issued a federal order that requires the testing of the nation’s milk supply amid increasing concerns over bird flu, which is spreading among U.S. dairy herds.

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Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Casting doubt on vaccines

Kennedy has grabbed headlines for promoting raw milk despite the public health warnings that it can harbor the bird flu virus. His views on vaccines could be even more consequential.

The Health Secretary could influence the rollout of a vaccine campaign and communication with the public. While it’s rare to do so, he could even override FDA decisions on vaccine approvals and authorizations, and how the CDC comes up with recommendations, notes James Hodge, a law professor at Arizona State University.

“There’s much he could do to disrupt vaccine programs in this country,” says Offit. “I have little doubt that were he to pass his confirmation hearing, that’s exactly what he’ll do.”

Last year, Kennedy took direct aim at bird flu vaccines in several posts on X.  

He cited the pharmaceutical industry’s financial interest in developing bird flu vaccines and he raised a conspiracy theory, suggesting that the government’s work on bird flu vaccines may be in anticipation of a “lab-derived pandemic.”

In June, he wrote: “With so much money on the table, is it conceivable that someone might deliberately release a bioengineered bird flu?”

Dr. Andrew Pekosz calls the idea “preposterous,” and points out that developing vaccines ahead of time is exactly what needs to be done, in case a crisis emerges in the future.

“This is the planning and preparedness that public health officials and scientists do to be ready to respond,” says Pekosz, a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Those vaccines could be the primary way we protect our population from a potential H5N1 pandemic.”

And contrary to Kennedy’s statement raising a safety concern, the existing bird flu vaccines in the federal stockpile, as with the seasonal influenza vaccine, “have shown a safety record,” he says. “They’re not dangerous.”

Those vaccines were developed to target older strains of bird flu and approved based on clinical data that looked at their safety and the immune response the vaccines elicited in participants. 

The federal government is now having manufacturers update these shots to more closely target the strain of bird flu in circulation — similar to what’s done with seasonal influenza every year — and is gathering more data based on new studies, which aren’t yet published.

Kennedy’s claim there’s “no evidence” the vaccines will work is misleading because their effectiveness can only be determined in human trials once a bird flu virus is actually spreading between people, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

“There’s no way we could know because we don’t have the virus that’s going to cause the next pandemic yet,” he says.

However, health officials have noted since the spring that the newer vaccines, ordered by the federal government for the national stockpile, appear well-matched against the virus circulating in animals, according to lab research on the immune response they generate.

There is also separate data published last July showing the originally licensed vaccines induce antibodies “that likely would be protective” against the current strain, says Offit, though you can’t know for sure without vaccine effectiveness studies.

If the virus changes significantly and begins spreading among people, it’s entirely possible the vaccine will need to be updated further. That’s why the federal government is not preemptively manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses right now, according to David Boucher, a senior official with the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.

‘A swift response’

In the event of a bird flu pandemic, Nuzzo says she expects Americans will “demand” vaccines, given just how deadly this virus might be.

“What I am worried about is whether any ideological opposition, or perhaps lack of understanding of science, gets in the way of a swift response,” she says.

If the virus started spreading among humans, the country would not be able to manufacture all the needed shots in a rapid timeframe.

It would take about six months to churn out 150 million doses, and even longer if the virus had changed enough to warrant another update, says Boucher. And that’s still not nearly enough to protect the entire U.S. population of more than 330 million people. 

Borio believes the government’s work to accelerate development on new bird flu vaccines will continue under Trump, based on her experience working under the first Trump administration.

“No president or Congress wants to see people dying needlessly of an influenza pandemic,” she says.

For his part, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, Dr. Marty Makary, has pushed back on concerns that Kennedy’s stance on vaccines should disqualify him from being secretary.

But this transition period is a delicate moment, when the country could be caught off guard if the situation suddenly changes, says Goodman, who recommends the Biden administration share its pandemic playbook so incoming officials can game out different pandemic scenarios and assess readiness. He also cautions that Trump’s team needs to preserve the federal workforce, including the career scientists, who have the knowledge on bird flu and pandemics.

“You want to keep the best people, not scare them away,” with “extreme rhetoric,” he says.

As Trump brings in new people, Pavia hopes he taps those with bird flu expertise, saying there are plenty of “conservative choices,” with backgrounds in biodefense and the military. After all, it was President George W. Bush who emphasized the threat of bird flu 20 years ago.

“What you can’t do is bring in novices. You can’t bring in people who don’t have any experience with the diseases or with the complexities of a response,” he says. “Mother Nature doesn’t care what your politics or your policies are.”