The CDC’s ACE Experiment: When Public Health Becomes Social Engineering

The CDC launched a five-year, $29 million initiative to “prevent stressful life experiences.” The problem? There’s no science to show it’s even possible.

CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

Rochelle Walensky, former Director of the CDC

Source: CDC
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched an ambitious experiment. It awarded eight states five-year grants to do something no one has ever done before: prevent stressful life experiences. Each state—California, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Virginia—will receive $485,000 annually, totaling nearly $29 million in taxpayer funding.
Who Did This?
The funding announcement was issued during the tenure of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who is better remembered for the agency’s widely criticized mishandling of masks, lockdowns, and vaccine messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Premise
These grants were issued as part of a “cooperative agreement”—a mechanism federal agencies often use to steer research and programming toward their priorities. In this case, the CDC’s stated goal was to fund projects for “the prevention of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and promotion of positive childhood experiences (PCEs).”
Each state’s plan followed the CDC’s prescribed template:

1. Build surveillance systems to collect statewide ACE and PCE data.
   
2. Implement a prevention project targeting one or more ACEs, “with a focus on health equity.”
   
3. Use the data to guide future prevention strategies.

Analysis
At first glance, the program sounds noble. Who wouldn’t want to reduce childhood adversity? Yet the scientific foundation is remarkably weak. Researchers have observed correlations between reported childhood adversity and later health problems—but correlation is not causation.

The entire ACE framework rests on cross-sectional studies that cannot establish cause and effect.

​No proven biological mechanism exists to explain how experiences as varied as parental divorce, neglect, or verbal abuse can directly cause both mental illness and a sweeping range of physical diseases, from heart attacks to cancer.

The notion that ordinary stress can reliably “kill” people has been asserted for years with almost no pushback on the lack of a mechanism.
Even more striking, there are no known public health interventions capable of preventing the ten ACEs:

• Emotional or verbal abuse
• Physical abuse
• Sexual abuse
• Emotional neglect
• Physical neglect
• Divorce or parental abandonment
• Domestic violence
• Parental substance abuse
• Parental mental illness
• Incarceration of a family member

These are deeply personal and family-level problems, not phenomena that lend themselves to large-scale government prevention programs. ACE projects lack the basic principle of a screening program that it be connected to available and effective interventions. As others have noted “there are no evidence-based interventions tied to scores on an ACEs Checklist” [1]. Other criticisms (see here) include that crude ACE scores are inappropriate for individual screening [2].
The Leap of Faith
The CDC’s mission is to protect the public from disease, injury, and disability. Yet with this ACE initiative, the agency has skipped the essential scientific step of demonstrating that ACEs cause the claimed health outcomes. Instead, it has leapt directly to funding prevention efforts—programs with no track record of success and no plausible path to reducing stress at scale.
Why Is This Happening?
This initiative arose under the Biden administration, which consistently advanced progressive, “woke” projects across federal agencies. In that political climate, the CDC aligned itself with broader ideological goals by framing childhood adversity as a public health crisis. Rather than focusing on proven disease prevention strategies, the agency redirected funds toward social engineering under the banner of “equity.” The grants reflect not only a left-leaning administration eager to expand government authority into family and community life, but also a CDC leadership willing to embrace unproven theories in order to remain aligned with prevailing political priorities.
 
 
References
[1] John D. McLennan, Andrea Gonzalez, Harriet L. MacMillan, Tracie O. Afifi, Routine screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) still doesn't make sense, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106708
[2] Robert F. Anda, Laura E. Porter, David W. Brown Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2020;59(2):293−295; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009