Betty C. JungThe Death of Public Health
Another Friday night massacre, but this time it's not just an essential federal public health agency that will die
rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...
The Death of Public Health
The Death of Public Health
This is the comprehensive dismantling of America’s national public health agency. One of my friends texted me last night: “They are eviscerating us. It’s surreal.”
These RIFs spanned the US government and were the work of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
Trump & the Republicans forced a government shutdown as a further means of centralizing power within the Executive Branch and cementing Trump’s authoritarian rule. Trump is shamelessly spreading propaganda like this “Government Shutdown Clock” on .gov websites
blaming the Democrats for the shutdown he and his party engineered. The Democrats aren’t capitulating yet, but they aren’t really doing much else of note. So Vought is using the ongoing government shutdown as a pretext to continue his premeditated murder spree of the federal workforce.
More than 4,000 public servants lost their jobs across the government last night. More than 1100 people of those were from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and from what my colleagues in multiple HHS agencies tell me, that was overwhelmingly concentrated at CDC.
To be very clear, these RIFs are illegal. There is nothing in the US Constitution that gives the President the power to begin culling civil servants because the government is shut down. The entire point of the division of power in American democracy is
that the President doesn’t have unlimited power over the whole of government, nor is he authorized to just fire entire organizational units of federal employees for political reasons. Trump and Vought are, as usual, trying to see what they can get away with.
However, if they get away with these lawless RIFs at CDC, the consequences will include a death toll. The people who got RIF notices work on some of our most critical public health functions.
Without them, CDC will not be able to provide these services. And without these services, Americans—and people around the world—will die.
CDC had already been brutalized by the Trump administration.
Besides suffering massive cuts on the Valentine’s Day and April Fool’s Massacres, Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have defunded critical programs, scaled back essential surveillance, dissolved expert committees, overridden standard evidence-based practices,
descheduled critical childhood vaccines, ignored the domestic terror attack in August, purged CDC of its leadership, and installed incompetent, unqualified, ideologically monstrous political appointees like Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill.
Dr. Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social goes into much more detail about the damage being done to the Public Health infrastructure, that's worth reading at:
rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...
The destruction of the CDC is brutal, most likely illegal and totally heinous.