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Francis Chung\/Zuma<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ever since<\/span> a government shutdown first started to seem like a real possibility, President Donald Trump has been threatening to use an impasse on Capitol Hill as a pretext to go after the people and institutions he doesn\u2019t like. His administration has moved to kill<\/a> New York City\u2019s biggest infrastructure project, announced his intent to cancel $8 billion<\/a> in clean-energy funding for states he lost last November, and vowed to fire employees and gut programs at what he calls \u201cDemocrat agencies<\/a>.\u201d What are \u201cDemocrat agencies?\u201d On Friday, we got an answer.<\/p>\n About 4,000 federal employees received layoff notices\u2014including \u201cnearly 100\u201d Housing and Urban Development staffers tasked with investigating fair housing complaints, according to Bloomberg<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>and 466 employees<\/a> at the Department of Education. The Department of Health and Human Services faced even steeper cuts, with over 1,000 people slated for termination. Among the public servants targeted by a \u201creduction in force\u201d (or RIF), the New York Times<\/em><\/a> <\/em>reported, were \u201c[r]oughly 70\u201d people who are colloquially known as \u201cdisease detectives,\u201d and the team that publishes the CDC\u2019s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s presidency has been defined by a steady deterioration of public information sources, and the dismantling of public health institutions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n As with a lot of Trump administration actions, the ultimate outcome might end up diverging quite a bit from what\u2019s been announced. Unions for federal employees are already fighting back in court (which is how we ended up with such precise numbers on the current round of RIFs to begin with). The idea that these RIFs are a necessity brought about by Democrats\u2019 intransigence is undercut by the fact that current Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has been planning for this moment \u201csince puberty<\/a>,\u201d according to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, and laying the groundwork for layoffs for years, according to my colleague Isabela Dias<\/a>. But as a symbol, the purge couldn\u2019t be clearer. These moves track with a larger pattern: Since January, Trump\u2019s presidency has been defined by a steady deterioration of public information sources, and the dismantling of public health institutions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s deleting of datasets from formerly public websites was so widespread in the early days of his second term that it has its own Wikipedia page<\/a>. It deleted<\/a> data on gender identity, sexual orientation, and climate change<\/a> and cut off funding en masse to research projects that aim to produce more<\/em> data on the concepts Trump doesn\u2019t like (including \u201cthe weather<\/a>\u201d). He has openly pushed to manipulate the census<\/a>. More recently, Trump fired<\/a> the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he was upset about unfavorable monthly jobs reports. (Last Friday, BLS didn\u2019t issue<\/a> a jobs report at all, sending the private sector scrambling to fill in the gaps.) So firing the people who produce the Morbidity and Mortality Report certainly tracks.\u00a0<\/p>\n The CDC\u2019s Morbidity and Mortality Report is not just any old morbidity and mortality report\u2014it\u2019s a key part of America\u2019s public health apparatus, something that has been published in some form by the government for almost 150 years<\/a>. The most recent edition is titled<\/a>, \u201cTularemia Antimicrobial Treatment and Prophylaxis: CDC Recommendations for Naturally Acquired Infections and Bioterrorism Response.\u201d I don\u2019t know what that means, but it doesn\u2019t sound like the kind of public-health information you want to outsource to TikTok.<\/p>\n This is the kind of work that might otherwise be considered essential. But in Trump\u2019s second term, people who work in public health have been treated as anything but, facing constant pressure from Trump, Vought, Elon Musk, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. One of Trump\u2019s first acts was to freeze foreign aid funding<\/a>, throwing into jeopardy overseas public-health programs that have saved millions of lives. (Some funding was eventually restored, but USAID, which helped administer those public health programs, was effectively dismantled after being thrown into a \u201cwoodchipper\u201d by Musk.) Kennedy undercut another key public-health institution in June, when he replaced<\/a> every member on the CDC\u2019s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. In the meantime, he and Trump held a press conference to announce their novel finding that taking Tylenol during pregnancy might cause autism.<\/p>\n\n