I helped build the US’s bioweapons defence. Trump scrapped it at the worst time

The circumstances surrounding the death of a 28-year-old lab technician at a Russian research institute remain clouded with uncertainty, but one point is clear: Donald Trump is actively dismantling the structures needed to protect the world from a potential future biological incident. Last Friday, Darya Shipilova died in a Siberian hospital, a week after she reportedly broke a test tube of pneumonic plague bacteria at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Russia. Nearly 200 of her contacts were put under observation. Moscow insists she died of “pneumonia” and that there was no accident, while a regional leader who first confirmed the plague edited his post to say she only “may” have died of it. On Tuesday, Russian outlets reported a second death at an Irkutsk hospital. Then those reports started disappearing, as the Kremlin urged Russians to trust only official statements. More than ten days on from the alleged incident, we still can’t say with any confidence what happened in a Russian lab linked to biological weapons research. Shorts Not long ago, it was my job to worry about situations like this. As chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security, I designed and stood up the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, one of the biggest reorganisations of the department since it was created after 9/11. I oversaw our National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and I toured the most secure Biosafety Level 4 labs (the highest level of biocontainment to safely study severe pathogens) in America, as well as BSL-3 facilities like the one in Irkutsk. I left government with frightening information about what our foreign adversaries were doing with biological weapons and fears about engineered pathogens. I can’t share the details here. What I can say, though, is that it worried me more than nuclear weapons, terrorism or cyber attacks. Let me be blunt. We cannot take the Russian government’s word on this. If we do, then we value our lives as little as Vladimir Putin values those of his own people. The Russians have a history of misconduct on this front. In 1979, anthrax leaked from a Soviet military facility in the city of Sverdlovsk and killed dozens of people downwind. The Kremlin blamed “contaminated meat” and stuck to that story for 13 years, until then-president Boris Yeltsin finally admitted in 1992 that the military was responsible. The Soviet Union had signed the Biological Weapons Convention a few years earlier, and all the while it was secretly running the largest bioweapons programme in history, including work on plague strains designed to withstand antibiotic treatment. Putin’s Russia has done nothing to earn more trust in the years since. Remember, this is a regime that uses chemical weapons to poison dissidents and silence critics abroad. It poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in London and sent intelligence officers to Salisbury with a nerve agent that went on to kill a British mother of three. I was part of the Western response to those incidents, and both left me with deep concerns about how Putin’s recklessness might seep into other areas of offensive warfare. Indeed, the US government assesses that Russia still runs an offensive biological weapons programme in violation of its treaty obligations. If a regime will lie through its teeth to the world about its chemical attacks on foreign soil, why on earth would we believe it about a possible plague leak at home? Lab workers at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and Far East (Photo: The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and Far East via AP) But I have another worry in all of this, and that’s my former boss, Trump. Asked about Irkutsk on Monday, he said “anybody that has that kind of a problem, we’re always willing to help,” called it the “pneumonia plague” and mused that microbes have gotten “stronger and smarter.” Trump’s poor grasp of science and national security is bad enough, but he’s also chronically unwilling to challenge Putin, and worse. I watched Trump as he stood next to Putin in Helsinki in 2018 and took the dictator’s word over his own intelligence agencies. We can’t afford that here. When an autocrat won’t give straight answers about a dangerous pathogen, we must keep up the pressure until Russia hands over clinical samples and genetic sequencing for independent labs to examine. What’s worse, and has largely gone unreported until now, is that Trump has taken apart the government office specifically designed to protect the American people from bio threats of this seriousness. After Elon Musk’s Doge team set its sights on the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, Trump told Congress he didn’t need it anymore, and this spring it was effectively deleted. Hundreds of WMD experts were scattered across DHS, reassigned to other work or pushed out. More than half the staff is now gone. Specialists who spent years learning how to spot a dirty bomb or a bioterror plot are now so hard to locate that lawmakers have asked government auditors to check whether anyone is still doing the job. I’ve talked to these people. They couldn’t believe that — or understand why — the White House would want to destroy an office responsible for detecting and stopping the next plague. Situations like the one in Russia are why they existed. But it’s too late. Their operation has already been dismantled. I can’t overstate how reckless this is. That directorate was built because these threats were too serious to leave spread across a sprawling department, with nobody clearly in charge or accountable when something went wrong. Trump has put us right back where we started, and he did it just as the danger is growing. The United States also formally left the World Health Organization in January, which means Washington is getting its information secondhand. And all of this is on top of the fact that, the last time we had a major bio event – the Covid pandemic — Trump essentially lit on fire 20 years of bio preparedness work. Administrations of both parties spent years after 9/11 building large bodies of work for how to respond if a dangerous pathogen emerged, crafting detailed presidential directives, interagency playbooks, a national response framework, and exercises that we rehearsed with the whole of the federal government and state and local agencies. In 2018, Trump signed a National Biodefense Strategy that set up a cabinet-level structure to run the response. I helped write it. He never read it. When Covid arrived, he threw nearly all of it out the window. Instead of using the machinery built for that moment, he ran the response from the hip through an improvised White House task force that answered to him and his moods. I watched years of preparation get sidelined almost overnight, and I believe it cost a great many lives. Covid showed how easily a pathogen can escape a lab, which I believe is the likeliest explanation for how that pandemic started. The CIA now leans the same way. British readers could fairly ask why this is their problem. The answer is that when America can’t contain a threat, nobody else is safe, either. More than a few times while I was at DHS, foreign governments came to us urgently asking for help from our counter-WMD experts, because few countries have that kind of bench. If that bench is gone, there’s no one left to pick up the phone in an emergency. And diseases don’t respect borders. An outbreak that we fail to stop in America will reach London and other cities soon enough. Whatever comes out of the Irkutsk situation — and all eyes are on whether there are secondary infections — it should be a wake-up call for the West. For most of history, it took a nation-state to build a biological weapon – involving teams of specialists and years of hands-on lab experience. Yet artificial intelligence is wearing those barriers down. AI companies themselves have warned that their most powerful, unreleased models can help someone trying to make a dangerous pathogen. That puts designer bugs within reach of terrorists, criminal organisations and even lone individuals, and Western defences are nowhere near ready for it, especially if the Trump administration is wholesale deleting offices that should be racing to figure out how to prepare for the age of AI-enabled bio threats. The plague may not have escaped a Siberian lab this month. But we shouldn’t count on getting lucky in the future. And we can’t expect to protect ourselves with our hands tied behind our backs.