While the virus continues to spread, the White House is cutting employees who coordinate testing for the virus
The Trump administration has fired a quarter of the federal employees in a central program office responsible for coordinating the tracking and monitoring the growing bird flu outbreak, Politico reports.
The news comes as the virus poses an increasing risk to humans and has caused egg shortages, leading to skyrocketing egg prices. Not only has the Trump administration fired 25 percent of the 14 employees in USDA’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network, which has a pivotal role in coordinating laboratories testing for animal borne diseases across the nation, the White House has also cut public health research spending and frozen nearly all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public communications about outbreaks.
Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory called the office “the front line of surveillance for the entire outbreak,” telling Politico, “They’re already underwater and they are constantly short-staffed, so if you take all the probationary staff out, you’ll take out the capacity to do the work.”
This is not the time to cut surveillance of bird flu. The virus is rapidly spreading through poultry flocks, leading to mass killings of birds, and scientists have uncovered a new strain spreading among dairy cattle. Bird flu has infected nearly 70 people in the U.S., although there is no evidence yet of human-to-human transmission. Most infections are among farm workers who were exposed to infected livestock.
Bird flu has also been detected in raw milk, a product that Trump’s newly-confirmed secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has promoted and said he drinks. Multiple agencies — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH) — all warned against drinking raw milk last March.
The firings are the result of an administration policy that laid off vast numbers of federal workers who were under probation, most of whom have been on the job for less than a year. Federal employees on probation are not yet entitled to protections granted to non-probationary civil service employees. The efforts are part of a plan to significantly shrink the size of the federal workforce. Elon Musk, leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has called for moving beyond firing portions of the workforce and wants to “delete entire agencies” of the federal government, including the Department of Education.
