It is the government equivalent of El Muskito buying Twitter and then wantonly disabling components with the assumption they do nothing.

You don't need historians to see the crisis as it was happening and as it's ongoing, the only question we need to ask is how long should the people held accountable be in prison for?

For abusing democratic offices the penalty should be at least one decade in keeping up with ancient Athenian democratic traditions.

Imagine how frustrated the laid off staff must be, especially if they end up either the illness themselves.

optimistic, this requires the arc of history to bend towards non-fascism.

DOGE is simply a tool of global capital, and shouldn't be singled out as the root cause of anything. Its purpose was to cut money from being redistributed through government programs, so it could go to the financial markets instead via tax cuts for the wealthiests and inefficient defense contracts. It achieved its goal wonderfully.

Well it's definitely not in piece/s I guess

> From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside

I hope I never have you as my manager If you think a ~70% reduction in head count isn't outrageous.

We've discovered that ambulance drivers are only driving people to hospital for 5% of the week. As such we've cut the 20 staff that used to give 120% coverage to 5. The 4 days of coverage is still more than 8x more than needed to cover working 5% of the week, so obviously we don't expect any deaths on the days we don't have any ambulance drivers working.

In the unlikely event excess ambulance drivers are needed we'll temporarily hire them on an ad hoc basis at double the normal rate. They will obviously happily jump on this opportunity, working less than 5% of the year at double pay is much better for just those hours than being paid 60% of what you'd get as an ambulance driver in another career all year round and actually being able to afford your mortgage.

The thing about crises is by the time you’re in them, they’re gonna cost way more to clean up than just not getting there in the first place.

Sounds like the lag time between going from 11 to 3 employees and having an outbreak was ~a year, so unless this is wrapped up fast enough and cheaply enough to cost less than 8 FTEs, we didn’t save a whole lot of money and we caused a whole lot of distress, so it’s hard to really call this a win.

Astroturfing still paying good?

While you're at it, give AI to the 3 employees and they will do the work of 30 /s

It's in the subheading:

> “Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” the former CDC lab director tells WIRED.

Surely the burden of proof here is proving that a 70% headcount reduction doesn’t make a difference.

Do you think that cutting funding to a lab would improve or hinder its ability to react to an outbreak like this one?

You think an agency with less people can more capably do its job? Come on now.

I don’t believe you need evidence when simple reasoning will do. Less people = less likelihood of an appropriate and timely response.

what would make you think that a downsized lab can do the same amount of work

As engineers we know that you can't catch everything. You build resilient systems by learning from your failures and investing/iterating in better practices over time. If you want to find out how to sabotage your company really quickly, just throw a bunch of politically radicalized interns with stupid red hats at your testing, QA, dev/ops, security, customer success (+etc) procedures, slash budgets, randomly, delete test suites and see where you land. Then when things go wrong, make sure your defense is "well we don't know they would have caught anything anyway."

The cuts were actual. There's no sense in calling something that is a matter of open public record which has been widely reported on "alleged."

I understand MAGA types like to fall over themselves to evade responsibility for their actions, because they think truth is a shell game and reality has no meaningful consequences if you deny them loudly enough (see: deaths due to science denialism during the covid response and shilling of bro-science alternative medicine, upsurge in preventable illnesses like measles due to vaccine denialism, brain drain from the insane gutting of public research funding institutions and cynical re-alignment of said institutions around corporations that donated to the presidency, drastic consequences of global warming, consequences of 2A zealotry in the form of school and other mass shootings... and so on and so forth).

The hard reality is that we've been trying to get a handle on food safety for over a century. It is incredibly laborious, difficult work that requires knowledge of the many and various ways contaminants make it into the food supply, how food producers like Taylor Farms obfuscate or lie to avoid legal liability or costly regulation, and knowledge of the law and how to shape and administer it effectively. If you slash regulatory agencies that have emerged over decades to own and shepherd this work, you're going to have to own up to a lot of nasty shit over the next few decades.

In my state, water pollution was so bad in the 70s and 80s you couldn't swim in major lakes and streams. Now you can. We got there through sustained public investment in regulation and oversight. We need more of that, not less.

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