Federal Vets Sacked By Elon Musk
These indiscriminate cuts will impact food safety and pandemic monitoring
Last fall, I warned about the stakes of the election for education, healthcare, and science. It brings me no joy to report that my predictions have been proven right. Far from the ludicrous claim—bordering on gaslighting—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025, over ONE THIRD of their policy objectives have already been implemented in the first month!
At the time I wrote that piece, I worried about coming across as overly dramatic, even hysterical (despite simply reporting their own plans), but if anything, they have moved faster and been even more extreme than my worst fears. The people behind Project 2025 promised funding and hiring freezes, and making changes that would enable them to fire people who were disloyal. What I was not prepared for was hundreds of thousands of layoffs and a bunch of unelected tech bros gleefully burning our government to the ground. Here is a partial list of this administration’s radical policy changes for science and medicine in the past few weeks:
Censored employees and studies at health agencies like CDC, NIH, FDA
Eliminated USAID in all but name
Gutted research investment:
Huge reduction in NIH indirect cost support designed to cripple universities
30-50% funding cuts for the National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (that includes the National Weather Service)
Passed a budget resolution calling for $880 billion dollars in cuts that would fall predominantly on Medicaid and/or Medicare
From the NYT article linked above: “Even if the committee cuts everything that’s not health care to $0, it will still be more than $600 billion short”
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who built his fortune on the back of massive government contracts and subsidies, has taken it upon himself to radically reshape federal agencies. While his actions are presented as efforts to reduce government waste, a closer examination reveals significant concerns about legality, conflicts of interest, and the actual impact on the national debt. Today I will be talking about what he and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—a backronym based on the crypto dog meme coin (yes, we’re living in the dumbest timeline)—are doing to dismantle our government, how veterinarians specifically are being impacted, and what you can do about it.
Ignorance, incompetence, or both?
Musk’s approach has involved accessing sensitive government systems, often bypassing established legal frameworks. Reports indicate that his team has compromised core government systems, like Social Security records, and mishandled sensitive data, leading to the resignation of 21 federal employees in protest. Legal experts argue that these actions violate multiple laws, including the Privacy Act and the Federal Information Security Modernization Act. Even more concerning, DOGE allegedly used access to the Treasury payment system to unilaterally defund USAID and potentially other agencies despite Congressional appropriation, raising serious Constitutional concerns.
Despite claims to the contrary, there is very little transparency about what, exactly, DOGE is doing with this data and what it is “deleting.” On their website, which is amateurish in appearance and light on details, they list a “Wall of Receipts” of supposed savings from cancelled federal grants. However, almost 40% of the cancellations are listed as saving taxpayers $0. Furthermore, this list has been riddled with errors:
Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.
The canceled contracts listed on the website make up a small part of the $55 billion total that the group estimated it had found so far. It was not possible to independently verify that number or other totals on the site with the evidence provided. A senior White House official described how the office made its calculations on individual contracts, but did not respond to numerous questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting. But it is clear that every dollar the website claims credit for is not necessarily a dollar the federal government would have spent — or one that can now be returned to the public.
I took a crack at browsing through some of the claimed cancellations and it seems obvious that there is no way anyone could do a thorough analysis of this many contracts in a few weeks. DOGE seems to have basically just used keyword searches to find anything it deemed “woke”—many of the entries concern DEI, “trans” (often used in contexts different than transgender), and various minority groups. When searching through cancelled contracts under HHS, it is a random mix of research grants, software licenses, and maintenance services for anodyne things like dry ice and chemical reagents:
Here are two randomly selected grants that were apparently cancelled:
One of these looks at genetic risk factors for coronary artery disease (CAD) and the other appears to be a drug trial for Alzheimer’s Disease. Neither saved us any money. It is hard to say why either of these were targeted. The grant on the left is listed as for National Jewish Health, but when I clicked on the FDPS page (which is now missing), it was actually for work in Oklahoma for the Strong Heart Study, a longitudinal multi-center study that has been evaluating risk factors for Native Americans with heart disease for decades1. The NJH runs a large genomics laboratory, so it’s possible they were partnering with the project to sequence blood samples looking for mutations associated with heart disease.
The DOGE and FDPS pages provide almost no details about any of these contracts, so it’s impossible to verify much about the research, why it was selected as “waste,” and why it was apparently removed from the wall of receipts over the past 48 hours. One thing is painfully clear: This sloppy mess is not how a good faith effort to audit government contracts should work.
“Fuzzy math”
Why are Elon Musk and his ragtag bunch of 19-24 year old coders mucking around in the federal government in the first place? The answer offered by Trump is that they are there to slash government fraud, waste, and abuse. Musk et al have claimed, for example, that there are millions of 150-year-old dead people collecting Social Security! This is obviously false. Musk’s claim is probably based on a combination of not understanding how the computer databases work, not being aware that there are systems in place to automatically cutoff SS payments to people at 115, a dash of bad faith nonsense, and a big dose of ketamine.
The reality is that while there is undoubtedly waste and fraud in the federal government (like all large organizations), it is not a widespread problem that would save much money. In fact, the article debunking 150 year old SS recipients explains:
…the “SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to implement and that the effort would have limited benefit to the administration of SSA programs.”
It is a similar story across the government: We already have audits, inspectors general, and systems in place to minimize this waste. Could they be improved? Probably! But Trump and Elon have been firing IGs and auditors, especially those that would investigate Musk’s own businesses.
So what’s really going on? One of the top priorities of Trump and the Republican Party is passing huge tax cuts at a cost of ~$4.5 trillion, so any reduced spending could help offset the lost revenue. Folks should know that their proposed plan would benefit only the top 5% of earners, while actually raising taxes for everyone else!
How much money could DOGE potentially save with their cuts? It turns out not much at all. Anyone with passing familiarity of the federal budget knows that the vast, vast majority of the money goes towards five things:
Social Security
Medicare
Medicaid
The military
Interest on the debt
The total for discretionary spending is only about a quarter of the budget. The cost of salary and benefits for ALL federal employees is <5%, all biomedical research is about 1%, and foreign aid comprises <1%.
Herein lies the big problem with cutting social services and research investment to fund upper class tax cuts (besides, you know, the moral one): the math doesn’t remotely work. As severe as the proposed cuts are, they don’t come even close to offsetting the revenue loss from tax cuts (and a few areas where they are increasing spending, like defense), meaning this will actually INCREASE the deficit and national debt!
So to sum it all up, a group of young engineers named after a crypto meme are accessing data they shouldn’t in violation of the Privacy Act and many other laws, indiscriminately cutting programs and personnel they don’t understand, doing so with virtually zero oversight or transparency, making constant errors, and the math to balancing the budget doesn’t remotely add up. Logan Roy from Succession put it best:
Veterinarians face the wrath of DOGE
Despite the lack of seriousness of Elon Musk and DOGE, their actions are all too real to those impacted by them. They aren’t just cutting contracts, but also firing large percentages of federal employees without cause. Just this morning, the New York Times reported on the firing of numerous veterinarians and animal scientists.
Overall, approximately 3,000 vets work in the federal government, with about a third of those in the military. Those let go (not all are DVMs) were from a variety of agencies, including approximately:
~800 at the USDA Agricultural Research Service
~400 at the USDA Animal Health and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
Vets at the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine (exact number unclear)
Vets at the CDC, focusing on zoonotic disease outbreaks (exact number unclear)
As with everything in this story, there is a lot of uncertainty over exact numbers and timelines, but this likely represents a significant reduction in the headcount of federal veterinarians, potentially over 20-30% of them.
Personnel who spoke to the NYT expressed concerns about losing vets who were monitoring the bird flu outbreak (a portion were re-hired after someone realized what a blunder that was), those who inspect farms and meatpacking plants, and those who examine animals at ports around the country (trying to prevent the spread of rabies, Foot and Mouth Disease, and many other illnesses that are not endemic to the US). Not only does this put the health of our pets and food supply at risk, it could hurt us economically. One USDA official put the risk to US exports bluntly:
“If the United States gets a reputation for having dirty products, does that mean other countries will also, you know, step in and say, ‘Hey, we don’t want to buy your goods’?”
The Veterinary Information News (VIN) Service also recently covered this developing story, with six federal veterinarians speaking on the record but anonymously (for fear of retribution). Here are just a few excerpts:
According to Dr. Y, she and her team were informed late last Friday that probationary staff were being let go. Probationary staff typically are those with less than one year on the job.
In a message on Signal, Dr. Y told VIN News that staff were informed employees would be notified of their firing by email. At the same time, their computer access would be shut off. “Not sure how exactly that works if folks were on leave or had left for the day prior to getting emails,” Dr. Y wrote, calling the situation chaotic.
***
When asked about recent reports of firings from the FDA, Dr. Q replied on Signal: “What is especially shocking here is that it is indiscriminate (no consideration of the impact or performance).”
She pointed out that FDA firings can’t legitimately be sold as saving taxpayer dollars. Her salary, and that of many other FDA staffers, is covered by user fees paid by drug companies. Dr. Q noted user-fee-funded staff were among those fired last weekend.
***
“It’s scary to think of the brain drain that is going to occur,” Dr. Z said, speculating that eliminating know-how is a deliberate strategy. “You get the institutional knowledge out, and you can do whatever you want to do.”
In recent days, I have also spoken on background with multiple veterinarians who work in the federal government. They shared experiences that are broadly consistent with the reporting above. All were worried about their own jobs and those of co-workers, as well disrupting the broader missions they serve. Each was reluctant to provide quotes or detailed information on the record, but indicated they might in the future as they see things deteriorate.
What you can do???
If all of this seems confusing and hard to follow, that’s because it is. This is partly a deliberate tactic of “flooding the zone” with so many actions and headlines that it becomes overwhelmingly and impossible to follow. And some part of this, as detailed above, is likely just the predictable resulting of putting a lot of chaotic and incompetent people in charge of important functions.
However, I would fight the urge to tune out or give up. Public pressure still works! Multiple unpopular Trump administration initiatives have already been walked back after backlash, including the nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, the Office of Management and Budget memo freezing all federal grants and loans, and Elon Musk’s directive to make all federal employees email him a list of their weekly activities.
I’m sure some of my readers are conservative or voted for Trump. I’m not going to sit here and guilt trip you. My guess is some of you didn’t know about the details in Project 2025. Others may have been vaguely uneasy about it, but are shocked at how much further this administration is going now that they’re in office. In any event, it’s never too late to make your voice heard.
Contact your representatives in Congress and encourage them to do their job checking the Executive Branch. Emails can be ignored, filtered, or deleted, but phone calls, physical letters, and showing up in person are much harder to dismiss. Indeed, the call volume to the Senate has exploded from an average of 25-40 a minute to over 1,500, crashing the system at times. I called my House Representative Kathy Castor (D) today and expressed my concerns about the cuts to public health to one of her staff. We had a nice conversation and she said that Rep. Castor was also very worried about Musk’s actions and had co-sponsored multiple bills to block DOGE from accessing American’s sensitive data. While this legislation won’t go anywhere without GOP support, Republicans in Congress are also starting to face angry questions from their own supporters in town halls2. This should be no surprise as these cuts are very unpopular:
Academic research supports the effectiveness of non-violent resistance. In fact, the political scientist Erica Chenoweth at Harvard found that it only takes 3.5% of a population actively engaged in protests to force change. That would be less than 12 million people in the US, or roughly the population of NYC + Los Angeles!
Finally, one of the best tools we have for public persuasion is to keep sharing stories of the real world impact of these policies. People generally support abstract notions like “cut government waste,” but they soon sour on it when you share stories of people losing their jobs, healthcare, student loans, etc.
That’s why if you are a veterinarian, scientist, or healthcare worker who has been impacted by these policies, I want to hear from you! I promise to maintain your confidentiality and won’t share anything without your authorization. Folks are understandably concerned about retaliation. That’s why I, like most journalists, have set up secure accounts for messaging (Signal) and email (ProtonMail). These systems are end-to-end encrypted and built for privacy, they cannot be accessed by the companies or anyone besides myself. Signal is often used to communicate in authoritarian or repressive countries, and ProtonMail is headquartered outside US laws in Switzerland. (I also regularly use a VPN and the privacy-focused browser Brave, which I’d recommend to all readers)
You can reach me through these tools at the following addresses:
ProtonMail: allsciencegreatandsmall@protonmail.com
Signal: AllScience.64 (or use the QR code below)
I hope to hear from people affected by the crude chainsaw of DOGE, and that protests gain steam to reverse this damage.
—Eric
The description of the research from the study website:
“SHS investigators are also trying to understand how genetics might affect blood cholesterol, blood pressure, and other factors related to heart disease. The study has shown that American Indians in the SHS have genetic risk factors related to heart disease that are both common to—and different from—other population groups. These results suggest that prevention and treatment efforts developed through the study of other population groups might not be as effective for American Indians. They have led to current efforts to better understand the unique set of genetic and environmental risk factors faced by American Indians.
The SHS is pioneering research to investigate the role of the environment—especially the presence of certain metals—in cardiovascular disease development. The SHS has found, for example, that arsenic and cadmium exposures are prospectively associated with higher cardiovascular risk. The SHS has also conducted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that showed that adverse cardiovascular events in the brain, such as stroke, are highly common in American Indian elders. Nearly 90 percent of these findings are subclinical, meaning they were not detected by routine health care or immediately recognized as stroke events; however, these subclinical strokes may contribute to cognitive or physical decline.”
Here are just a few small selection of stories and videos of angry town halls from…
Idaho Kootani County Republican Central Committee Town Hall (where a woman was ejected by force):
I am deeply tempted to send this the the GRD
Though our country might have devolved into complete authoritarianism by then—we are, after all, one *month* into a 48-month ordeal—it may be helpful to remember the midterms are historically unkind to the party in power.
And they are two years away.