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Ever since a government shutdown first started to seem like a real possibility, President Donald Trump has been threatening to use an impasse on Capitol Hill as a pretext to go after the people and institutions he doesn’t like. His administration has moved to kill New York City’s biggest infrastructure project, announced his intent to cancel $8 billion in clean-energy funding for states he lost last November, and vowed to fire employees and gut programs at what he calls “Democrat agencies.” What are “Democrat agencies?” On Friday, we got an answer.
About 4,000 federal employees received layoff notices—including “nearly 100” Housing and Urban Development staffers tasked with investigating fair housing complaints, according to Bloomberg, and 466 employees at the Department of Education. The Department of Health and Human Services faced even steeper cuts, with over 1,000 people slated for termination. Among the public servants targeted by a “reduction in force” (or RIF), the New York Times reported, were “[r]oughly 70” people who are colloquially known as “disease detectives,” and the team that publishes the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Trump’s presidency has been defined by a steady deterioration of public information sources, and the dismantling of public health institutions.
As with a lot of Trump administration actions, the ultimate outcome might end up diverging quite a bit from what’s been announced. Unions for federal employees are already fighting back in court (which is how we ended up with such precise numbers on the current round of RIFs to begin with). The idea that these RIFs are a necessity brought about by Democrats’ intransigence is undercut by the fact that current Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has been planning for this moment “since puberty,” according to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, and laying the groundwork for layoffs for years, according to my colleague Isabela Dias. But as a symbol, the purge couldn’t be clearer. These moves track with a larger pattern: Since January, Trump’s presidency has been defined by a steady deterioration of public information sources, and the dismantling of public health institutions.
The administration’s deleting of datasets from formerly public websites was so widespread in the early days of his second term that it has its own Wikipedia page. It deleted data on gender identity, sexual orientation, and climate change and cut off funding en masse to research projects that aim to produce more data on the concepts Trump doesn’t like (including “the weather”). He has openly pushed to manipulate the census. More recently, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he was upset about unfavorable monthly jobs reports. (Last Friday, BLS didn’t issue a jobs report at all, sending the private sector scrambling to fill in the gaps.) So firing the people who produce the Morbidity and Mortality Report certainly tracks.
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Report is not just any old morbidity and mortality report—it’s a key part of America’s public health apparatus, something that has been published in some form by the government for almost 150 years. The most recent edition is titled, “Tularemia Antimicrobial Treatment and Prophylaxis: CDC Recommendations for Naturally Acquired Infections and Bioterrorism Response.” I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of public-health information you want to outsource to TikTok.
This is the kind of work that might otherwise be considered essential. But in Trump’s second term, people who work in public health have been treated as anything but, facing constant pressure from Trump, Vought, Elon Musk, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. One of Trump’s first acts was to freeze foreign aid funding, throwing into jeopardy overseas public-health programs that have saved millions of lives. (Some funding was eventually restored, but USAID, which helped administer those public health programs, was effectively dismantled after being thrown into a “woodchipper” by Musk.) Kennedy undercut another key public-health institution in June, when he replaced every member on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. In the meantime, he and Trump held a press conference to announce their novel finding that taking Tylenol during pregnancy might cause autism.
“Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen,” Trump said.
Why lean on published reports, when you can get that kind of health advice from the commander in chief himself?
