CDC cuts expected to decimate Epidemic Intelligence Service
statnews.com
statnews.com
I'd guess this is the main reason DOGE targeted this particular agency for extreme cuts (other sources reporting 50% [0]). It's the same reason DOGE is wiping out all the fed's new hires—because those are probationary, it's possible to fire them with less administrative work. It has zilch to do with competence or efficiency. It's outright anti-aligned with competence, in this case: this agency (EIS) hires–per that quoted paragraph–highly-skilled outsiders at far above public-sector wages. That they're easy to fire means there was a lot less dead-weight, to begin with, in this subgroup relative to the rest of the federal bureaucracy.
(Perhaps it's a good time to read up which other federal agencies hire under this Title 42).
These people are much more interested in creating a shallow facade of efficient small-government, than in putting in the actual hard work towards building one. Because this isn't efficiency; this is vandalistic looting!
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-disease-detectives-doge-cut... ("CDC's "disease detectives" halved as part of DOGE cuts at health agencies")
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
I do believe Trump's attacks on our regulatory agencies are going to kill people...
But it does seem implausible that firing the FAA director, an advisory committee, and a ATC hiring freeze could result in a crash 9 days later.
It took about two years for the world to more or less return to normal when COVID struck. Instead of conservatives learning a lesson about that, they instead just declared COVID as fake, lied about vaccines, and reelected the demagogue that's partly responsible for the virus's wide spread in the US in the first place.
Frankly, it's tiring. I don't know why about half the country wants this.
If the current administration doesn’t prove their value, the people will start to have a say in another 2 years at the house level.
None of this is a surprise. It's not even like 2016, where people could say "I figured he'd be less bad than he said he would be" with a straight face.
Whatever excuse they found to not vote for the Democrat in 2024, will still apply in 2026 and 2028. Or they'll find a new one.
And turnout in midterms is even worse than in Presidential years. I don't see those non-voters suddenly taking an interest then.
It would be fantastic if somebody learned some lessons. But I think 2024 proves pretty definitively that people don't learn lessons.
My recollection is that non-voters tend to be reliably lazy, but I can’t find a good source.
The system almost relies on it. If you can identify a non-voting bloc, in primaries or ideally even generals, you can tax them to give goodies to citizens.
It's maddening, they complain about Trump, and when I mention that they didn't vote they say "YOU THINK KAMALA WOULD BE BETTER??? YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO FIX THIS PROBLEM BY VOTING LOL!!". And of course, they never define what "the problem" is, so there's actually no way to solve it, so they never have to actually vote.
By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected. It's the opposite of when Progressives don't like a Democrat's proposal but still vote for it; it means the Democrats don't have to negotiate with them because they're getting the vote anyways.
> By not voting for Harris and making her lose it means next cycle people have to care about your opinion to get elected
What actually happens:
The party rationally writes off this flaky voting bloc as not worth the effort, and instead goes further to the right.
It's honestly pretty fucking dismissive of people who are affected by Trump's regressive policies. "It sucks that you got deported but maybe in fifteen years you'll thank me because we will have a proper progressive in office to fix problems that are really important but apparently impossible for us to actually enumerate with any kind of consistency".
Like the Gazans!
The American Palestinian movement has been 100% about the protesters themselves. Not the Palestinians. The Defund the Police and Chesa crowd found a new cause to ruin. Folks who have never been to both countries confidently redrawing borders on another continent, the new Sykes and Picot.
No? It makes you electorally irrelevant. Possibly toxic. Trump has carte blanche with Gaza because it’s not an issue any senior Democrat is willing to fight for after the Palestine vote proved both mercurial and unreliable. Hell, I’m experiencing some schadenfreude with the whole thing.
The way to play it is to bloc vote in primaries and then reliably turn out in generals. See: the NRA.
One of the first steps to righting this ship is to get our terminology straight and stop calling them conservatives. Conservative is not a synonym for Republican. Conservatives respect institutions, America's contribution to the world, fiscal responsibility, want to slow gradual change, etc. In the last election, the conservative option was squarely the Democrats. The modern grassroots Republican parties are populist reactionaries, and the people they've elected are (neo)fascists. The probable landscape is that they are just working for China to destroy this country and sell off the pieces.
The problem with your analysis is that you don't have the power to define what conservatism is; if enough populist reactionaries wrap themselves in the mantle of conservatism (which they absolutely have) then they gain effective ownership of teh term and ruin it for everyone else. I agree with your general thesis but think the rot goes back longer than 3 decades, although it got markedly worse after Newt Gingrich became speaker, around the same time that Fox News started on cable.
As an example, consider Phyllis Schlafy's 'Eagle Forum'. Founded in 1972, its always been a reflection of its late founder's strident reactory outlook, to the point that their periodic rants about communism seem quaint and anachronistic. You could be forgiven for thinking it was relevant for political scientists studying the American right in the 20th century...except the US attorney for DC (a guy named Ed Martin Jr) is an Eagle Forum veteran, and a glance at his X timeline shows he's still all in on la Schlafly, doing official government business through his X account (eg publishing documents ther and nowhere else), and generally living down to the stereotype of a wild-eyed ideologue.
In short, I don't believe terminological exactitude isn't going to get us out of this. The famously cranky Samuel Johnson, writing disdainfully of a British Prime Minister in 1775, commented 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'. His point was that any concept invested with general-purpose social value - patriotism, love of nation, belief in community, conserving the body politic - can be exploited for short-term political gain to the detriment of long-term well-being. It's a perennial problem.
The thrust of my comment was exactly that we need to stop letting them wrap themselves in the cloak of the flag and conservatism, when their actions demonstrate the complete opposite agenda. Anybody cheering on the current destruction yet calling themselves a conservative (likely to absolve themselves from what they're actually supporting) needs to be solidly mocked.