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- Apr 22, 2019
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Heather Cox Richardson:
The administration’s chaos extends [beyond destroying the CDC] to the Social Security Administration (SSA), where the administration forced Chief Data Officer Charles Borges to resign today. Borges had acted as a whistleblower for the agency when he identified serious data breaches that leave more than 300 million Americans at risk of identity theft and loss of benefits. In his resignation letter, Borges noted that he was leaving involuntarily after the administration had made it impossible to perform his duties legally and ethically and had caused him “serious attendant mental, physical, and emotional distress.”
In his letter, Borges noted that he has “served this Country for almost my entire adult life, first as an Active-Duty Naval Officer for over 22 years, and now as a civil servant. I was deployed during 9/11, decorated for valor in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and graduated from US Naval Test Pilot School. As a civil servant, I have served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, in the Centers for Disease Control during COVID, within [the Office of Management and Budget] on the Federal [Chief Information Officer] Data Team, and now serve as the SSA Chief Data Officer. I have served in each of these roles with honor and integrity.”
Makena Kelly and David Gilbert of Wired reported that less than 30 minutes after Borges’s resignation hit the in-boxes of SSA staff, it disappeared.
The removal of dedicated civil servants for trying to protect the public extends to the Environmental Protection Agency, where tonight the Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”
“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said. But, increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.
That includes the outing last week of an undercover intelligence officer, which has in the past been enough to lead to an indictment of an administration official. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the name of a senior undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer when she published a list of 37 current and former officials from whom she was stripping security clearances. Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard did not consult with the CIA before posting the list on X. At the time, Gabbard said she was acting on Trump’s orders.
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark took a step back today to look at the general operating system of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) part of the Trump administration and noted that it has always operated by throwing out wild conspiracies while actual scientists try to do the work of protecting America’s public health. Now, he notes, Kennedy and MAHA are the dog that caught the car. Faced with creating the new system that they promised voters would keep them healthier, they are flailing. Their key public-health report relied on fake studies concocted by AI, and Kennedy has slashed through advisory bodies and is currently limiting access to covid vaccines, all while the administration’s budget reconciliation bill is forcing people off health care insurance. Kennedy recently mused wildly about watching children in airports and realizing they have mitochondrial challenges.
Egger’s observation about MAHA fits MAGA as a whole. Trump and his ilk have spent years carping about how poorly the government is working and how much better they would be doing if they were the ones in charge. Voters gave them what they asked for, and now they appear to be unwilling or unable to do the actual work of governing. Instead, Trump and his cronies are simply declaring emergencies and then announcing policies they claim will address those emergencies. When their policies backfire or raise opposition, they claim they are being sabotaged by the deep state or that statistics are wrong.
The administration’s chaos extends [beyond destroying the CDC] to the Social Security Administration (SSA), where the administration forced Chief Data Officer Charles Borges to resign today. Borges had acted as a whistleblower for the agency when he identified serious data breaches that leave more than 300 million Americans at risk of identity theft and loss of benefits. In his resignation letter, Borges noted that he was leaving involuntarily after the administration had made it impossible to perform his duties legally and ethically and had caused him “serious attendant mental, physical, and emotional distress.”
In his letter, Borges noted that he has “served this Country for almost my entire adult life, first as an Active-Duty Naval Officer for over 22 years, and now as a civil servant. I was deployed during 9/11, decorated for valor in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and graduated from US Naval Test Pilot School. As a civil servant, I have served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, in the Centers for Disease Control during COVID, within [the Office of Management and Budget] on the Federal [Chief Information Officer] Data Team, and now serve as the SSA Chief Data Officer. I have served in each of these roles with honor and integrity.”
Makena Kelly and David Gilbert of Wired reported that less than 30 minutes after Borges’s resignation hit the in-boxes of SSA staff, it disappeared.
The removal of dedicated civil servants for trying to protect the public extends to the Environmental Protection Agency, where tonight the Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”
“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said. But, increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.
That includes the outing last week of an undercover intelligence officer, which has in the past been enough to lead to an indictment of an administration official. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the name of a senior undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer when she published a list of 37 current and former officials from whom she was stripping security clearances. Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard did not consult with the CIA before posting the list on X. At the time, Gabbard said she was acting on Trump’s orders.
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark took a step back today to look at the general operating system of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) part of the Trump administration and noted that it has always operated by throwing out wild conspiracies while actual scientists try to do the work of protecting America’s public health. Now, he notes, Kennedy and MAHA are the dog that caught the car. Faced with creating the new system that they promised voters would keep them healthier, they are flailing. Their key public-health report relied on fake studies concocted by AI, and Kennedy has slashed through advisory bodies and is currently limiting access to covid vaccines, all while the administration’s budget reconciliation bill is forcing people off health care insurance. Kennedy recently mused wildly about watching children in airports and realizing they have mitochondrial challenges.
Egger’s observation about MAHA fits MAGA as a whole. Trump and his ilk have spent years carping about how poorly the government is working and how much better they would be doing if they were the ones in charge. Voters gave them what they asked for, and now they appear to be unwilling or unable to do the actual work of governing. Instead, Trump and his cronies are simply declaring emergencies and then announcing policies they claim will address those emergencies. When their policies backfire or raise opposition, they claim they are being sabotaged by the deep state or that statistics are wrong.
