The Trump administration has dismantled decades of bipartisan anti-smoking efforts, raising fears that preventable deaths and nicotine addiction will once again rise.
In May, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported one of the greatest public health victories of the past 50 years: A government survey found that cigarette smoking among U.S. adults dropped to an all-time low of 9 percent in 2025—the first time the smoking rate hit single digits.
In the 1970s, some 40 percent of U.S. adults smoked daily, as well as 16 percent of teenagers, but a culmination of tobacco taxes, smoking bans and remarkably successful public education campaigns turned around what is still the nation’s largest cause of preventable death.
Which is why it is so astounding that the Trump administration, despite its stated goal to “make America healthy again,” is rolling back its smoking cessation efforts.
- A highly effective 14-year ad campaign created by the CDC, called Tips from Former Smokers, went dark September 2025.
- The agency’s Office on Smoking and Health, which managed the campaign and worked with states on smoking cessation measures, has also been closed for more than a year and all its staff laid off while many of the CDC’s anti-smoking web pages are archived.
- In May the Food and Drug Administration, under pressure from the White House and over the objections of its commissioners, Dr. Marty Makary, approved the sale of fruit-flavored e-cigarettes, which are particularly appealing to teens and adolescents. It also issued a policy allowing the flavored vapes to be more widely marketed. Makary promptly resigned.
This war on anti-tobacco efforts makes no sense and threatens to reverse decades of progress. Even with the decline in popularity, 25 million Americans continue to smoke cigarettes, and tobacco use is still the leading cause of disease, death and disability, killing over 480,000 people in the United States each year.
Flavored vapes, which can lead to nicotine addiction, will likely boost those numbers. The FDA reports 7.2 percent of high school and middle school students—that’s 20.1 million children—reported using tobacco last year, and 5.2 percent used e-cigarettes.
If smoking continues at its current rate among U.S. teens, the CDC estimates, one out of every 13 Americans currently younger than 18 will die prematurely from a smoking-related illness.
Studies have found the “Tips from Former Smokers” ads, which showcased devastating interviews with people dying from smoking-related illnesses, prompted millions of people to call state-managed phone lines for help on quitting. And since the ads went off air, calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW have plummeted, along with enrollment in programs that offered counseling and nicotine gum and patches.
It turns out anti-smoking is one of few bipartisan issues: After pressure from Congress, the CDC in recent weeks gave states limited funding to air ads from the campaign’s archives but it will not produce any new ads or negotiate contracts to air them nationwide.
The New York Times also pointed out that tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration last year. Reynolds American, the company that makes Newport and Camel cigarettes, made a $5 million donation to a Trump super-PAC one week before the flavored e-cigarettes were approved. “There is no definitive evidence linking the donations to the lapse of the ad campaign,” the paper reported, “but the decision to terminate it was one of several steps the administration has taken to unravel federal government antismoking initiatives that had long had bipartisan support during a time when the administration has delivered significant policy wins to tobacco companies.”
The rollback of federal smoking cessation efforts promises to do tremendous harm to public health and will land particularly hard on the most vulnerable members of society. Cigarette smoking remains disproportionately common among groups at higher risk, including people with lower levels of education or income, people of color, the LGBTQ community, military personnel and people living with mental illness.
We need more attention towards interventions, more research, more resources—and less influence from Big Tobacco. It will be a massive public health failure if next year’s CDC survey finds the U.S. smoking rate creeping up again.
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