since then A government shutdown was beginning to look for the first time like a real possibility, and President Donald Trump was threatening to use the impasse on Capitol Hill as an excuse to go after people and institutions he didn’t like. His administration Go for the kill New York City’s largest infrastructure project has announced its intention to cancel it 8 billion dollars In financing clean energy for the states he lost last November, he pledged to fire employees and deny programs in what he called “Democratic agenciesWhat are “democratic agencies”? On Friday we got an answer.

About 4,000 federal employees have received layoff notices, including “nearly 100” Housing and Urban Development employees tasked with investigating fair housing complaints, according to Bloomberg, and 466 employees In the Ministry of Education. The Department of Health and Human Services faced even steeper cuts, with more than 1,000 people scheduled to be terminated. Among the public servants targeted by the “reduction in force” (or RIF) are the New York Times It was reported that there were “about 70” people known colloquially as “disease investigators,” the team that publishes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly morbidity and mortality report.

As with many Trump administration actions, the final outcome may end up deviating slightly from what was announced. Federal employee unions are already fighting back in court (which is how we ended up with such precise numbers in the current round of RIFs to begin with). The idea that these policy and regulatory frameworks are a necessity resulting from Democratic intransigence is undermined by the fact that current Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has been planning for this moment.Since puberty”, according to Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, and laid the groundwork for layoffs for years, according to My colleague Isabella Dias. But as a symbol, purification could not be clearer. These moves follow a larger pattern: Since January, Trump’s presidency has been characterized by the continued degradation of public sources of information and the dismantling of public health institutions.

The administration’s deletion of data sets from previous public sites was so widespread in the early days of his second term that… Its Wikipedia page. He – she It has been deleted Data on gender identity, sexual orientation, And climate change And collectively cut funding for research projects aimed at production more Statements about concepts Trump doesn’t like (including “the weather“). He openly pushed to Census manipulation. And more recently, Trump Fired Head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he was upset by unfavorable monthly jobs reports. (Last Friday, BLS Not issued jobs report at all, sending the private sector scrambling to fill the gaps.) So the firing of the people who produce the morbidity and mortality report certainly tracks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Report is not just an old report on morbidity and mortality rates, it is an essential part of America’s public health apparatus, something that has been published in some form by the government since 2008. Nearly 150 years old. The latest edition is Titled“Antimicrobial Treatment and Prevention: CDC Recommendations for Naturally Acquired Infections and Responses to Bioterrorism.” 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 type of work that might be considered essential. But in Trump’s second term, people who work in public health have been treated as outliers, facing constant pressure from Trump, Vogt, Elon Musk, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. One of Trump’s first actions was: Freezing foreign aid fundingThis jeopardizes public health programs abroad that have saved millions of lives. (Some funding was eventually restored, but USAID, which helped run public health programs, was effectively dismantled after Musk threw it into a “wood chipper.”) Kennedy undermined another key public health institution in June, when replacing Each member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, he and Trump held a press conference to announce their new discovery that taking Tylenol during pregnancy may cause autism.

“Nothing bad can happen, only good can happenTrump said.

Why rely on published reports, when you can get this kind of healthy advice from the Commander-in-Chief himself?