Trump Cuts Ten Thousand Workers Responsible For Food Safety And Disease Research

Employee purges began at the Department of Health and Human Services this week, with ten thousand workers now on the chopping block. These are the people responsible for researching and tracking infectious diseases, ensuring the safety of our food, and monitoring dangerous products like tobacco. This administration has launched a full-on assault on science, and these employees have become the collateral damage.  Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what’s happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

This week, health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Proudly announced the revolution has begun. That's what he posted on his social media account, uh, right after one of his latest appointees, of course started his first day of work. And on that first day of work, the two men immediately got to work laying off roughly 10,000 workers, 10,000 scientists, doctors, researchers, data analysts, people in charge of making sure that the food you eat is safe, making sure that the prescription drugs you take don't have deadly side effects. And even people whose job it is to make sure that we are properly regulating tobacco and nicotine products all gone because the revolution has begun. Let me read you this. The layoffs are expected to shrink Health and Human Services down to 62,000 positions. Lopping off nearly a quarter of its staff, 10,000 jobs through layoffs, and another 10,000 workers who took early retirement and voluntary separation offers.

Some staffers began getting layoff notices in their work inboxes at 5:00 AM this week, while others found out their job had been eliminated after standing in long lines outside offices in Washington, DC, Maryland, and Atlanta, to see if their badges still worked. So some of these employees didn't even get the courtesy. People that have been there for decades didn't even get the courtesy of being sent an email saying, Hey, you don't have a job anymore. They didn't get a memo, a personalized letter saying, we're sorry, but we're letting you go. They went into work, scan their badge, and if it didn't work, well, I guess that means you're fired, right? Because that's the level of unprofessionalism that this administration has brought to every single cabinet department and Robert F. Kennedy jr's Health and Human Services is clearly no exception and none of these people have any class whatsoever.

But the class issue, right? You know, just being horrible, crappy people that treat others like dirt, that's almost minimal compared to the damage that is going to be done to this country as we fire all the smart people, all of the people with advanced degrees, all of the people whose sole job in life is to keep us safe. You know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Talked a big game of making America he again, but I don't see how we're gonna be healthier when we don't have scientists and doctors reviewing measles outbreaks or bird flu outbreaks, both of which are happening in this country right this second, when we don't have those people

Analyzing our foods, being in charge of recalls. When the latest food product is found to be overly contaminated with salmonella, those people are gone. And it was their job to keep us safe. But I think what me off the most about it is the fact that there is no rhyme or reason to these cuts. You know, if they could come out and prove to us that, listen, we cut these people because their position is redundant. Maybe this person was actually really, really bad at their job and we want to replace them with somebody better. At least that would be a justification. But not just in health and human services, but across the government. They're cutting people for the sake of cutting people. They're throwing out arbitrary numbers like, we're gonna get rid of 10,000 people without ever stopping to think, is that how many actually need to go? Do we have to fire to they? They create numbers out of thin air, and then that's how many people they fire, because nobody in this administration is qualified to hold the position which they currently hold. None of them, not one of them. And this is what you do. This is what you get, and this is going to be a disaster for consumers across this country.