A friend quit the CDC earlier this year. I asked why and she said that it was due to frustration at how little was being accomplished. “Ninety percent of the people there should be fired,” she said. Was that because she’s a Deplorable? Of course not! She even knitted a pussy hat and righteously protested Trump’s anti-women policies. She also does the No Kings and anti-ICE rallies.
Some fresh hysteria today about what Trump and RFK, Jr. have done to the beloved CDC. It seems that they’ve done about one third of the firing that my friend thought would make sense (but maybe not of the same people)?
It’s only white Boomers who love the bloated unproductive version of the CDC?
Also interesting, the NYT article contains a great example of begging the question, as the philosophers and logicians use the term:
For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the undisputed global leader in public health.
(“a fault in a dialectical argument in which the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true”)
Certainly, the Europeans and the Islamic Republic of the UK haven’t been enthusiastic about following some of the CDC’s headline recommendations, e.g., 78 COVID-19 shots by age 75 (vs. 1 in the UK), flu shots every year for healthy adults under 65 (vs. 0 in the UK).
If you need to lose friends quickly, incidentally, one good way to do it is by correcting anyone who says “That begs the question…” to mean “That raises the question…”.
> If you need to lose friends quickly, incidentally, one good way to do it is by correcting anyone who says “That begs the question…” to mean “That raises the question…”.
I don’t know…my wife corrected me about some picky terminology in set theory, and she then went from mildly annoying to hopelessly fascinating. It is interesting that in math, the technique of induction could be described as “begging the question”, at least at the base.
Another way to lose friends quickly is interacting with them in pretty much any shape or form on Facebook. *poke*
I wouldn’t know anything about FaceBook by Zuck. Columbia had a paper Face Book (not sure if all the Ivys had them, Harvard did I think) in the 1980s, and I didn’t participate in that except to check out hot incoming freshwomen that I talked to in person.
Yes, many people on the insides of these agencies should be fired, but that seems to be true of any large organization now. I used to think that the private sector was a lot leaner and more adept, but they apparently cannot fire the problem people either (even in the traditional business sense) without facing lawsuits. And then when they do keep these people, they also get lawsuits. So it makes sense to me that hiring has slowed down because every person hired is a potential financial risk.
See “Uber to Pay $40 Million to Parents of Woman Fatally Hit by Car” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/business/uber-payment-woman-killed-freeway-california.html)
Now to be fair, this is an Uber driver (so technically not an employee), but you’d think a competent corporate staff could either manually or technologically weed out problem drivers and customers (which sadly appeared to be both in this instance) in order to not destroy the company’s hard-earned profits over a single misfortune.
@samue, I have to disagree. There is plenty of firing and restructuring happening within American corporations, just Google it (or, as we should say these days, AI it).
The difference is that when the government does it, which rarely happens, there is usually a lot of protest and pushback, and the media covers it day after day how disastrous it will be for those being let go and those who rely on the services of the government. When a corporation does it, it often becomes little more than a news blip.
I don’t understand why the government can’t restructure its workforce and eliminate positions in much the same way corporations do. Why should government employment be fundamentally different in that respect?
That’s a great point, George. If a government agency cuts 1% of staff that spawns headline hysteria. Nobody will be able to get any services from the agency going forward because only 99% of the “workers” remain. When Google laid off 12,000 people in January 2023 nobody said “I won’t be able to search anymore”. When Microsoft axed 10,000 at the same time nobody said “How will I get support for Office 365?” When Cisco axed 7% of its workforce in August 2024 and then another 5% in 2026, nobody said “My packets, my packets!!!”