Kim Bellard
Maybe you are the kind of person, as if food in the grocery store magically appeared somehow without supply chain vulnerability along the way. You believe that the water you drink and the air you breathe are good, and don't worry about what you will encounter before you meet. You think the chances of a tornado or hurricane hitting your location are low, so no early warning system is needed. You think you are healthy and don't have to worry about any annoying outbreaks or a complete pandemic.
OK, I'm worried about all of this and so on. Say your will to the federal government – and there are many things that can't be done badly – historically, it's a surveillance and warning system for these and other potential disasters. Now, under the Governor and the Trump administration, many of them are defiled or at least at risk.
But, at the end of the day, we are at risk.
Here is a list of unexhausted examples:
FDA: Although HHS Secretary Kennedy vowed that he would keep thousands of inspectors overseeing food and drug safety, it has suspended its quality control program for its food testing lab and cuts support staff, among other things, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, please check. Even ahead of the recent cuts, the 2024 GAO report warned that the FDA already lacked inspectors.
The FDA has fired key personnel responsible for tracking bird flu, including all leadership teams in the office of the Director of Veterinary Medicine Center. Also: “Food compliance personnel and animal drug examiners survived, but they did not have anyone to issue safety alerts in the communications office, and no managers paid for test products to external laboratories,” an FDA official was not authorized to speak publicly. CBS News.
Worse, the draft Trump budget proposal will further cut the FDA budget, partly due to the transfer of “regular” food inspections to states.
Department of Disease Control: Oh my god, where to start? Cuts shut down labs that help track things like liver outbreaks and gonorrhea that resists antibiotic resistance. It's hard for us to track the current measles outbreak that began in Texas, which has now spread more than halfway.
The White House wants to encourage more babies in life, but cuts a national surveillance program that collects detailed information on maternal behavior and experiences to help states improve mothers and infant outcomes. It helps compare IVF clinics. “We have been following this information for 38 years, and it improves mother's health and understanding of mother's experiences,” said one of the statisticians. Washington Post.
Effectively shutting down smoking and health offices, one expert called it “the biggest gift to the tobacco industry in the past half century.” CDC cuts will force the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop collecting data on car crashes, alcohol, adverse drug effects, aircraft incidents and work-related injuries.
And, if you want to take a cruise, you should know that even if these positions are paid by the cruise company rather than the federal government, the CDC’s cruise inspections have been fired.
EPA: While EPA chief Lee Zeldin “absolutely” guarantees that Trump's cuts won't hurt people or the environment, the EPA has announced that it will stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions, is closing all offices of environmental justice, and is ending related initiatives that “this move will affect how the waste and recycling industry measures and tracks the impact of its environment on neighboring communities.” ”
The EPA proposed rollback 31 key regulations, including regulations that limit harmful air pollution in automobiles and power plants; restrictions on mercury emissions, neurotoxins; and waterproof protection for clean rivers and streams. Mr. Zeldin called it “the greatest day of elimination of regulation our country has seen” and declared it “a direct entry into the heart of the religion of climate change.” But, of course, it won't hurt anything.
The EPA also proposes relaxing rules on coal ash storage and disposal. Most of us don't know much about coal ash, but Environmental Health News Warning: “Fly ash is one of the largest industrial waste streams in the United States, containing toxic elements such as arsenic, mercury and lead.” Meanwhile, sister Niosh has abandoned two-thirds of the staff who perform black lung screening for coal miners, despite President Trump's alleged love for coal miners.
American Institutes of Health: NIH deserves and articles, I have introduced some of them before. The Trump administration has frozen research by many young scientists on its track, which severely cuts the amount of elevated funds that research universities rely on and is now using NIH grants for political blackmail (to Colombia's Ad Ad Harvard!).
Its proposed budget will almost half the NIH budget and consolidate its 27 institutions into eight. “This will completely succumb to biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director of the American Federation of Experimental Biology, told him. science.
I can continue to move forward with other agencies and if I don't notice the National Weather Service cuts and NOAA will mean “downgrade operations”, that marks me, I will be forgotten.
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ProPublica Calling the government's efforts “measurement war”:
In agencies, governments are losing the ability to measure how American society works, making it harder for elected officials or others to measure the nature and scale of the problems we face and the effectiveness of solutions targeting them.
It continues to assert that “there is a clear potential motivation for measuring the war in one way: making it harder for critics to measure the impact of the Trump administration’s layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy.”
Working is also a war about science. Climate change deniers and vaccine deniers are how we delegate our lives and health to people who reject good science and tend toward our own personal beliefs, especially when that will make more money for big donors.
This is a crisis. This is a disaster. It's our future and we don't know that some of these things are happening until it's too late.
Kim is the former emarketing Exec of the main blues program, late editor and regret tinture.ionow regular THCB contributor
