# The CDC Is Cutting Its Health Survey by 70 Percent, and Disability Questions Are the Biggest Casualty By Kuraish Hosen · Health · Published Sun, 04 Oct 2026 09:28:41 GMT Source: The Current Tribune — https://currenttribune.com/article/cdc-nhis-redesign-disability-questions-removed The federal government’s longest-running health survey is about to get dramatically shorter, and the questions disappearing from it aren’t random. A major redesign of the National Health Interview Survey is stripping out a significant chunk of the questions used to track disability in America, and disability advocates are warning that the country is about to lose visibility into exactly the population that needs to be counted most. ## A Survey That’s Tracked American Health Since the Eisenhower Era The National Health Interview Survey has been collecting data on the health of the U.S. population since 1957, making it one of the oldest continuously running sources of health statistics in the country. Researchers, policymakers, and federal agencies lean on it constantly to understand everything from chronic disease prevalence to healthcare access gaps, and its long, consistent history is exactly what makes it valuable — it lets analysts track trends over decades rather than relying on one-off snapshots. That consistency is now being traded for brevity. The redesigned adult questionnaire shrinks from 482 questions down to just 150, a reduction of nearly 70 percent. Any survey cut that dramatically is going to lose something, and in this case, a substantial share of what’s being cut sits squarely in questions about disability. ### What’s Actually Being Removed The questions on the chopping block cover hearing aid use, fatigue, cognitive function, and mobility aids like wheelchairs and scooters. These aren’t peripheral details — they’re core indicators researchers use to estimate how many Americans live with various forms of disability, how that population is changing over time, and where healthcare systems and policy need to respond. ## The Official Explanation A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services characterized the changes as being driven by a push to lower the cost of collecting the data. Shorter surveys are cheaper to administer, easier for respondents to complete, and reduce the burden on the government agencies processing the results. That’s a real and understandable pressure facing any large-scale data collection effort, especially one that’s been running for nearly seven decades without fundamental restructuring. But cost isn’t the only factor at play here, based on internal CDC documentation. Stephen Blumberg, a division director at the CDC, acknowledged in an earlier memo that the redesign “does not provide the desired depth of information” on disability topics that had been a consistent feature of the questionnaire since 2019. That’s a notably candid admission from inside the agency itself: this isn’t just a cost-cutting measure with no downside, it’s a cost-cutting measure with a known, acknowledged tradeoff in data quality. ### Timeline of the Redesign - **2025:** Blumberg’s internal memo flags that the redesign will reduce the depth of disability-related data collection. - **August 2026:** The CDC formally proposes the questionnaire overhaul. - **October 2026:** The redesign draws public attention and criticism as advocacy groups and researchers weigh in on the specifics of what’s being cut. ## Why Disability Advocates Are Alarmed Katy Neas, who leads the disability advocacy organization The Arc, is among those raising concerns about the change, along with academic researchers including Scott Landes, a sociology professor at Syracuse University, and Jean Hall, a disability scholar and professor emerita at the University of Kansas. Their objection isn’t abstract. Disability data collected through surveys like this one feeds directly into decisions about healthcare funding, accessibility infrastructure, disability benefit programs, and research priorities. Weaken the data, and you weaken the evidence base that all of those downstream decisions rely on. There’s a specific concern about mobility aid questions in particular. Tracking how many Americans use wheelchairs or scooters isn’t just an academic exercise — it feeds into everything from public transit accessibility planning to Medicare and Medicaid policy decisions about durable medical equipment coverage. Losing granular data there doesn’t just create a gap in a research database; it creates a blind spot in exactly the kind of planning that affects people’s daily ability to get around. ### The Cognitive and Fatigue Questions Matter Too It’s easy to focus on the more visible disability categories, like mobility aids, but the planned removal of cognitive function and fatigue questions is arguably just as significant. Those questions have been instrumental in tracking conditions that don’t come with obvious visible markers, including various forms of cognitive impairment and chronic fatigue conditions that have historically been undercounted and under-resourced precisely because they’re harder to see and measure. Cutting the survey questions that actually did measure them risks pushing those populations further into statistical invisibility. ## The Cost-Versus-Data Tradeoff, Honestly Assessed It’s worth taking the cost argument seriously rather than dismissing it outright. Running a 482-question survey across a nationally representative sample is genuinely expensive, and government agencies across the board are under real pressure to do more with less. A shorter survey administered more efficiently could, in theory, be sustained for longer and reach more respondents than an expensive one that risks being cut entirely in a future budget fight. The counterargument from advocates is that disability data specifically shouldn’t be the line item that absorbs the cuts, given how directly it feeds into policy decisions affecting a population that already struggles with being undercounted and underserved in federal data systems generally. Both things can be true at once: the survey probably did need some kind of modernization, and the specific choice to concentrate cuts so heavily on disability-related questions reflects a judgment call that disability advocates clearly don’t agree with. ## What This Means Surveys like the National Health Interview Survey rarely make headlines, but they quietly shape years of healthcare policy, research funding, and program design long after anyone remembers the specific questionnaire that produced the underlying numbers. Cutting the disability-related questions by this much doesn’t just shrink a government form — it narrows the lens through which the country understands how many people live with disabilities, what kind, and what they need. Whether the redesign moves forward as currently proposed or gets revised in response to this pushback will say a lot about how much weight advocacy groups and researchers still carry in shaping federal data collection decisions that, once finalized, tend to stick around for a very long time.