Friday, the New York Times published a tasty palace intrigue story about a recent White House meeting that turned ugly when some Cabinet members complained about Donald Trump giving billionaire Elon Musk carte blanche to fire thousands of federal employees at random. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy complained that he has “multiple plane crashes to deal with now,” but Musk was trying to fire air traffic controllers. Secretary of State Marco Rubio lashed out at Musk over mass layoffs, sarcastically asking whether Musk “wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again.” Musk, typically, responded by gaslighting the two men, denying his assault on the federal workforce, even as he continues to brag about the same behavior on X. Trump responded weakly by publicly claiming that, going forward, the approach to staff cuts will be “the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.'” The words are hollow, however, as Trump shows no actual sign of being willing to stand up to Musk, who is operating as the shadow president.
While Duffy and Rubio quietly protest Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), one Cabinet member seems all too happy to welcome this opportunity to force social and economic collapse: Robert Kennedy, who heads Health and Human Services (HHS). Kennedy is letting Musk have whatever he wants, law or morality be damned. On Friday, all 80,000 HHS employees were sent an email asking them to resign for a pittance of $25,000, giving them only a week to decide. DOGE has also been handed an HHS database containing sensitive financial data about nearly all American workers, which was established to streamline child support systems. Career officials objected to letting Musk have private income data of millions, but they were overridden.
Kennedy is letting Musk have whatever he wants, law or morality be damned.
This is happening at the same time Kennedy, who falsely claimed he was not anti-vaccine during his confirmation hearing, has moved to decimate vaccination access as swiftly as possible. He canceled the FDA’s annual meeting to set the year’s flu vaccine schedule and terminated a program to develop a pill form of the COVID-19 vaccine. Monday, the Washington Post reported that the National Institutes of Health were ordered to cut funding for research into vaccine acceptance. Texas and New Mexico are experiencing a measles outbreak, due to MAGA parents refusing to vaccinate children. Even though two people have already died, Kennedy has refused to advise vaccinating children, instead insisting parents use cod liver oil and vitamin A to treat the disease. (These “treatments” don’t work and can make children sicker, according to actual doctors.) In 2021, Kennedy spoke glowingly of having measles as a fun experience for children, because they get a “great week” of staying home to watch TV. In reality, as the John Hopkins Hospital site explains, the best-case scenario is “high fever, cough, conjunctivitis (red, runny eyes), runny nose and a rash that begins on the face and eventually covers the entire body.” If you’re less lucky, it can cause permanent neurological damage or death.
Kennedy, however, insisted that the real issue is the supposedly wretched diets of rural people in this county in Texas (over 90% of whom voted for Trump). “We see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen,” he argued, insisting, without evidence, that the child who died may have had a poor diet.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
The depths of Kennedy’s sinister plan, however, were revealed in last week’s announcement that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have been ordered to “study” the link between autism and vaccines. That may sound good in theory — who doesn’t love a study? — but in practice, the odds are high that such a “study” will be unscientific or even outright fabricated. We know this because there are literally hundreds of studies showing no such link. Kennedy has been shown these studies, over and over and over and over and over again, but every time, he pretends he didn’t see the studies and insists he’s holding out for “the science.” The only study Kennedy will publicly endorse isn’t really a study, but a blog post written by anti-vaccine activists. That history suggests he will only accept a preordained and false conclusion that demonizes vaccines.
The biggest obstacle to drafting a fake “study” that “proves” vaccines are dangerous, of course, is the existing staff at HHS and its sub-agencies like the CDC. The bureaucracy is built out of real doctors and scientists who won’t make up “evidence,” especially not when the result is more disease and death. That’s where Musk and DOGE come in. Their tactics are designed not, as advertised, to get rid of “waste and fraud.” The goal of indiscriminate firing, threatening offers of “buyouts,” and other abusive tactics is to run out people who are good at their jobs, in hopes of causing a total system collapse. For Cabinet members like Duffy and Rubio, who appear to believe it’s better if children aren’t starved or planes don’t fall out of the sky, Musk’s behavior is vile. For Kennedy, who loves the measles but hates the medical establishment, laying waste to the systems that protect Americans from disease is the entire point.
The CDC has already been heavily targeted by Musk, who fired nearly 750 employees at the Atlanta-based agency, without any regard for what they do or how well they do it. The shotgun approach was such a disaster that the Trump administration then circled and begged 180 of the fired employees to come back. But while those people are spared — for now — this fits with a bigger picture of Musk taking a flamethrower to an unfathomable amount of medical research and prevention work, both here and abroad.
Musk’s plan to cut 80,000 jobs from Veterans Affairs is already wreaking havoc on medical research. As the New York Times reported over the weekend, along with providing health care to American veterans, the agency runs and funds much of the nation’s cutting-edge medical research. For several reasons, including the ability to keep paperwork straight easily, veterans make a great population for such research. One of the benefits of being a veteran is access to new approaches for conditions, ranging from mental illness to cancer, that have proved unresponsive to more widely available treatments. In many cases, these problems arise from a veteran’s time in service, such as being exposed to chemicals in Iraq or developing PTSD from battle trauma. But with Musk’s slash-and-burn tactics, those veterans are being cut off from what is often their very last option for care.
The New York Times also reported last week how Musk’s decimation of USAID “has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to threatening viruses and bacteria.” As the article notes, these diseases inevitably find their way back to the U.S., where they will meet increasing numbers of Americans who, because of MAGA, are refusing to take basic precautions like vaccination or even hand-washing. Kennedy’s vision of a measles “vacation” for millions of American children is getting closer, but of course, it’s going to involve mostly suffering and a lot of dying, and not so much fun time watching TV in bed.
Kennedy obsessively insists there was a halcyon time before modern medicine — and especially before vaccines — that Americans were “healthy.” His war on the medical establishment and health research is rooted in a view that cutting people off from doctors and hospitals — and especially from preventive care like vaccines — will somehow breed “sturdier” Americans who are “healthy again.” The eugenicist urge is not far from the surface, right down to the tendency to see people who die of preventable illness as weak links who needed to be “culled” anyway. Of course, it’s all nonsense. In 1900, an era that Kennedy hints was a “healthier” time, 18% of children died before age 5. Life expectancy was 47 years old for the average American, a full 30 years short of where it is now. Kennedy loves to talk about “chronic disease,” but doesn’t mention how once-common disabling conditions like gout, rickets, polio injury, or consumption have disappeared. Unfortunately, he’s got a powerful friend in Musk, who also developed a radical and anti-scientific loathing of disease prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic. If they continue down this path, the measles horror show in Texas will be coming for the whole country.
