Dr. Angela Rasmussen: The Death of Public Health

[Nevilledog]

https://rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-of-public-health

It’s never a good night when the texts start rolling in from my government colleagues. Last night was the worst one yet. Reductions in force (RIF) notices began pouring into inboxes across the US federal government, disproportionately at the CDC. Entire centers had their leadership teams gutted, along with all their staff. 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. President Donald Trump and 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.

*snip*

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[spanone]

2. K&R