Individual Heroism is not a Public Health Strategy: The Problem with a "Zero Drownings" Mantra

The "zero drownings" mantra was always aspirational. Now, with federal programs dismantled and nonprofits running on fumes, it has become something worse: a distraction from what's actually being lost.

When I first wrote about the “zero drownings” goal in 2024, my concern was pragmatic: it was an unachievable target that set lifeguards up for psychological collapse and communities up for a false sense of security. That critique still stands. But something has shifted, and it’s darker than I anticipated.

The conversation has moved. The question is no longer whether “zero” is the right goal. The question is whether we will have any coordinated national effort at all.

What the numbers actually say

Let’s start with the data because it’s stark.

That last figure deserves to sit in your chest for a moment. One hundred and ten dollars. That is the cost per child of swim instruction that cuts drowning risk by nearly 9 in 10 cases. And yet, the federal program that was delivering exactly that: reaching over 22,000 children in 2024 alone, has been eliminated.

The defunding no one is talking about enough

In early 2025, the Trump administration terminated the CDC’s drowning prevention team and proposed eliminating the program entirely from the FY2026 budget. The program had a $2 million annual budget, a rounding error in federal spending, and strong bipartisan support when it was established. Three health scientists. Gone.

"If this program saved one life, it would be far more than the total cost of the program." Jim Mercy, former director, CDC Division of Violence Prevention

The irony cited by former CDC officials: these cuts were made in the name of efficiency. The drowning prevention program cost $2 million per year. A single drowning death costs millions in medical expenses and societal loss — to say nothing of the grief that has no price tag.

At the same time, FEMA cancelled its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program and removed Flood Mitigation Assistance funding for 2025, eliminating nearly $3.3 billion in existing hazard mitigation resources. Water safety, broadly defined, has been systematically deprioritized across multiple federal agencies simultaneously.

The “zero” goal versus the real cost of inaction

Here is where I want to push beyond my 2024 argument. The problem was never just that “zero” is impossible. It’s that chasing an absolute, aspirational number without commensurate funding creates a scarcity mindset that quietly suffocates the organizations trying to do this work.

I’ve sat in rooms with nonprofit leaders in this space. The conversations are the same everywhere: How do we track every dollar? How do we justify this expense? How do we prove impact before we’ve had the runway to create it? Every penny is accounted for, and that accounting has become the mission itself.

This is what the scarcity mindset does. It doesn’t just shrink budgets, it shrinks imagination. Organizations stop asking what they could build and start managing what they can barely sustain.

“We build and imagine what we are able to do now with so little funding. That constraint is not a virtue, it is a symptom.”

— Nathalie Martin, Swim Global Project

A tale of two frameworks

Consider what happens when you compare two goal-setting philosophies side by side:

Australia’s sustained 25% reduction over two decades wasn’t an accident. It came from consistent investment, measurable targets, and programming that could demonstrate incremental wins to funders. That’s the model. Not a slogan on a banner but a structure that can survive political cycles.

The equity dimension we cannot ignore

What was being defunded was not neutral. The CDC team’s work was specifically focused on communities with the highest drowning rates: Black Americans, American Indian and Alaska Native communities, and children from low-income households where formal swim instruction has historically been inaccessible.

The drowning rate for Black Americans was 28% higher in 2021 than in 2019. That gap was widening. The CDC program was one of the few federally coordinated efforts directly addressing that disparity, and it has been eliminated.

Meanwhile, small organizations across the country are doing extraordinary things with almost nothing. A Houston nonprofit teaching underserved youth to swim. A Washington state organization that has supported nearly 1,000 children since 2022 and successfully advocated for state water safety legislation. Community pools in New York are finally receiving capital investment after decades of disinvestment. These programs exist because people cared enough to build them against the current of underfunding.

But individual heroism is not a public health strategy.

What ambition actually requires

Here is what I want to say to every organization in this space having the same scarcity conversation: you are not failing because you haven’t achieved zero. You are operating in a system that has chosen not to fund the infrastructure needed to get us measurably closer.

Formal swim lessons reduce the risk of drowning by 88% among children ages 1 to 4. We know this. At $110 per child, reaching the estimated 10 million American children without basic water safety skills would cost $1.1 billion, roughly what the federal government spends every two days on defense. This is not a resource problem. It is a priorities problem.

The ambitious goal should not be zero as a chant. The ambitious goal should be: 50% reduction in drowning deaths within a decade, with equity benchmarks built in, funded at a scale commensurate with the problem, measured transparently, and defended against the political cycles that have already stripped us of momentum twice in a generation.

That goal is harder to put on a t-shirt. It is also the only one that might actually save lives.

Data sources: CDC Vital Signs Report (June 2024); NPR/TPR reporting on CDC program termination (August 2025); The Conversation analysis of CDC Injury Center cuts (October 2025); WHO Global Status Report on Drowning Prevention 2024; Australian National Drowning Report; American Red Cross water equity reporting (2026).

Originally published 2024. Updated April 2026 to reflect federal program eliminations and current data.