USDA Scrambles to Rehire Bird Flu Experts DOGE “Accidentally” Fired

Donald Trump’s administration can’t stop mis-firing.

The Department of Agriculture is scrambling to rescind the terminations of “several” agency employees who were working to address the bird flu outbreak, amid sweeping layoffs at the behest of Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency.

A USDA spokesperson released a statement Tuesday saying, “Although several positions supporting [bird flu efforts] were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters.”

The spokesperson said that “USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions,” and noted that several positions at the agency had been exempted from cuts, promising that the USDA is continuing to “prioritize the response to highly pathogenic avian influenza.”

Politico reported Sunday that USDA’s 14-person National Animal Health Laboratory Network program office, which coordinates laboratories working on the government’s response to animal disease outbreaks, had been hit by the Trump administration’s sweeping layoffs.

“They’re the front line of surveillance for the entire outbreak,” Keith Poulsen, the director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, told Politico. “They’re already underwater and they are constantly short-staffed, so if you take all the probationary staff out, you’ll take out the capacity to do the work.”

This isn’t the first time Trump and Musk’s sweeping cuts have chopped off a limb sorely needed. Last week, 300 employees who oversee the U.S.’s nuclear stockpile were fired from the National Nuclear Security Administration, and then quickly invited to return to their highly essential jobs.

Earlier this month, Trump’s new Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that the agency had invited Musk’s DOGE team in with “open arms,” and promised that layoffs would be “forthcoming.” The White House has stated that DOGE doesn’t make the cuts to federal agencies and departments itself, but rather advises the heads of those agencies on where to trim the fat—or in this case, crucial staff.

Members of the House Agriculture Committee weren’t too pleased with the mistake, according to NBC News.

“They need to be more cautious,” Republican Representative Don Bacon told NBC News, referring to the DOGE team. “There’s an old saying, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ Well, they are measuring once and having to cut twice. Some of this stuff they’re going to have to return back. I just wish they’d make a better decision up front.”

So far, the bird flu outbreak has led to the death of 22 million birds in the last 30 days, sent the price of eggs skyrocketing, infected 68 people, and resulted in the death of one person. But some experts believe that it can, and will, get worse.

Robert Redfield, the former director for the Centers for Disease Control, told Politico Tuesday that COVID-19 “was a minor epidemic compared to the epidemic that’s coming, which is a bird flu pandemic.”

Redfield warned that “this is not a time to cut our ability to have a rapid public health response agency.”

Donald Trump is attempting to interfere in Brazilian politics on behalf of his far-right ally Jair Bolsanaro.

The president’s company Trump Media Group filed a lawsuit against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes in U.S. federal court in Tampa, Florida, Wednesday, accusing him of censoring free speech by restricting the company’s Truth Social platform. Video platform Rumble, popular with the right wing, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The timing is suspicious, because Bolsonaro, formerly the president of Brazil, was indicted Tuesday on charges of attempting a coup after losing the 2022 election. Bolsonaro’s case is now being decided by the Brazilian high court, and de Moraes is not only overseeing that indictment, but also multiple other criminal investigations into the former president.

It’s not the first social media fight for Moraes—last year, he won a legal fight against Elon Musk’s X platform, with X finally agreeing to suspend accounts that Moraes argued were threatening democracy after defying Brazilian court orders for three weeks. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s charges include a plot to poison his successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and assassinate de Moraes.

Last month, Bolsonaro called for Trump to take action against de Moraes, accusing the justice of targeting him for political reasons and censoring right-wing voices in Brazil. This lawsuit seems like Trump’s attempt to get involved, and filing it in a friendly U.S. court seems engineered to get a positive ruling for Trump and his fellow coup-plotter. But unlike with Trump, it appears that Brazilian courts may actually be able to hold Bolsonaro accountable.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a stern warning to President Donald Trump on Wednesday after the latter blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Ukraine itself, incorrectly stating they “should have never started it.”

Zelenskiy communicated that he’d like Trump and his administration, which has ceded more and more to Russia every day, to “be more truthful.” He also said that Trump “lives in a disinformation space” and that said disinformation is coming straight from Russia.

Trump on Tuesday also said that new elections in Ukraine would be mandatory in any diplomatic resolution, claiming Zelenskiy is “down at 4% approval rating,” another clear Russian talking point. In reality, Zelenskiy holds a narrow 52 percent approval rating among Ukrainians.

Years of U.S., Ukrainian, and greater European allyship and cooperation are collapsing just one month into Trump’s second term. His love for Putin and his dismissiveness towards Ukraine is a far cry from the American foreign policy of old. Instead of millions of dollars of military aid to Ukraine or sanctions against Russia Trump is holding aid hostage unless Ukraine forks over valuable rare earths, while Putin continues to acquire Ukrainian territory.

Inflation is up, but Donald Trump would sooner find any other scapegoat than deal with the critical economic issue.

“Inflation is back,” Trump said passively during an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I’m only here for two and a half weeks.”

“Inflation is back and they said Trump—I had nothing to do with it,” Trump said. “These people that run the country, they spent money like no one’s ever spent it.”

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to lower costs for American consumers on “day one.” But three weeks into his second administration, Trump has repeatedly avoided answering the hard questions on exactly how he’s going to provide relief for Americans’ wallets.

U.S. inflation was up in January—the consumer price index indicated that prices rose by 3 percent that month compared to a year earlier, according to data released last week from the Labor Department.

Rent alone made up 30 percent of that increase, according to The Washington Post’s economic columnist Heather Long, who noted on X that the “core” consumer price index—which excludes the volatile prices of food and energy—had practically stalled since June.

But Americans were still feeling sticker shock for some key grocery staples in January, when the price of a dozen eggs soared by 13.8 percent and averaged $4.95 across the country—a price tag that’s still up by 53 percent from last year, according to The New York Times. Egg prices are only expected to increase amid a widening outbreak of avian flu, which has temporarily shuttered New York City’s poultry markets and skyrocketed the cost of a standard dozen eggs to more than $12 in Key Foods and CTown amid a nationwide egg shortage.

Earlier this month, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the Trump administration doesn’t “have a timeline” for alleviating the nation’s critically high cost of living.

Regardless of whether Trump is willing to take the blame for the economic churn, the nation is still pointing its finger his way. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that Trump’s approval rating sank, while the share of Americans who felt the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53 percent. That was 10 percent higher than was reported during a January 24–26 poll, when 43 percent of Americans felt the same way.

Just 32 percent of polled Americans approved of Trump’s performance on inflation, according to the Reuters poll.

Elon Musk won’t stop showing just how little he understands about the U.S. government.

The billionaire technocrat joined President Donald Trump Tuesday night in an interview on Fox News’ Hannity, to attempt to justify the Department of Government Efficiency’s invasion into the sensitive files of government agencies and the Trump administrations’ efforts to gut the federal government.

Musk falsely reasoned that he could do whatever he wanted because of a mandate from U.S. voters.

“All we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we’re finding is an unelected bureaucracy,” said Musk, who himself is unelected and increasingly unpopular among voters.

“There is a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and Cabinet. You look at D.C. voting and it’s 92 percent Kamala,” Musk noted.

“If the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy,” he said. “And so I think what we’re seeing here is sort of the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore the will of the people.”

“Is this making sense?” Musk asked.

No, it isn’t, and it’s because of Musk’s ironic disposition toward the founding document that is the U.S. Constitution, which sought to establish three branches of government that act as checks and balances on each other.

Neither Musk nor Trump care about the actual structure of the government, or that it was created in direct response to the tyranny of monarchy. That’s why they so openly attempt to skirt the rules about destroying federal agencies such as USAID, which can only be done by an act of Congress, and float impeaching judges who say things they don’t like. To them, there is only the executive branch, the reins of which Musk seems to have happily taken off of Trump’s hands.

Trump on Tuesday announced he would unveil an aggressive set of tariffs, confirming the worst fears of manufacturers across the auto, semiconductor, and pharmaceutical industries.

“It’ll be in the neighborhood of 25 percent,” the president said, when asked about the specific rate he’d be placing on foreign automobile imports. When asked about semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, he noted they’d be “25 percent and higher, and it’ll go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”

Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that the tariffs on automobiles could come as soon as April 2.

In Trump’s telling, the tariffs are designed to strong-arm companies into bringing their manufacturing onto U.S. soil. About 20 percent of car sales in the United States last year were imports from Canada and Mexico. But 25 percent tariff on those sales would upend the auto supply chain and likely cause costs to rise dramatically, which would then of course lead prices for consumers to rise as well.

“Whether it’s auto tariffs that he comes up with on the fly or a general tariff, the net result is closures of plants all over the U.S. at the same time as Canada and Mexico,” Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association president Flavio Volpe told Politico.

Time will only tell how Trump plans to convince American consumers that they should keep footing the bill—while the price of everything from automobiles to gaming consoles to Ozempic skyrockets.

Now that he has been confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to put his frightening ideas about public health into action.

Kennedy made a speech to HHS staff at the Washington, D.C., headquarters Tuesday and announced that he planned to begin investigations into whether anti-depressant medications and the childhood vaccine schedule are responsible for chronic diseases in the United States. The speech was intended for staff only, although a livestream link was distributed.

“Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said, and urged staff to keep an “open mind.”

“We will convene representatives of all viewpoints to study the causes for the drastic rise in chronic disease,” Kennedy added. “Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized.”

Kennedy’s comments on childhood vaccines contradict his testimony during his Senate confirmation hearings, where he told the Senate Finance Committee, “I support vaccines. I support the vaccine schedule. I support good science.”

Several medical studies have debunked claims that vaccines and SSRI anti-depressant medications are linked to chronic illnesses or conditions such as autism. But now that Kennedy has been confirmed, it seems that he can stop pretending to support such health measures.

Over the weekend, several thousand probationary federal health employees were fired, only one day after Kennedy’s confirmation. With fewer employees to oppose him, Kennedy can put his debunked theories about public health into practice, and the consequences could be disastrous.

Promises kept? Not quite.

Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday purporting to expand access to in-vitro fertilization, but the mandate falls short of his actual campaign promise to make IVF free.

“🚨PROMISES MADE. PROMISES KEPT: President Trump just signed an Executive Order to Expand Access to IVF! 👶” announced Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s emoji-happy press secretary, in a post on X.

“The Order directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments.” she wrote.

Crucially, the order does not mandate any of these things, only recommends them. The order’s “recommendations will focus on how to ensure reliable access to IVF,” according to a fact sheet about the order obtained by NOTUS.

In August, Trump claimed that if elected to a second term, he would have either the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF, which can cost thousands of dollars.

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump said in an August interview with NBC. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

When pushed to clarify exactly who would shell out for these procedures, he said that one option would be to make insurance companies pay “under a mandate.”

A White House official told NOTUS Tuesday that this order was the Trump administration’s “first step” toward realizing that promise.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Trump bragged about the toothless order. “I’ve been saying that we’re gonna do what we have to do,” he said. “And I think that the women, AND families—husbands, are very appreciative of it.”

It should come as no surprise that Trump is going to do what he has to do, just not what he said he would do.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller threw a temper tantrum on live television Tuesday while tunelessly singing the praises of Elon Musk’s disastrous Department of Government Efficiency.

When faced with even the simplest questions about DOGE, Donald Trump’s former immigration ghoul couldn’t keep his cool long enough to make it through an interview on CNN.

Host Brianna Keilar asked Miller to clarify who was responsible for removing 300 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration on Thursday, before the Department of Energy had frantically rescinded the terminations the next day.

“So then, who is it making those decisions of which federal employees are terminated?” Keilar asked.

“Well, in that case the secretary of energy would be the one. So, what you’re describing would be the cuts in the Department of Energy, those are directed by the Senate-confirmed secretary of energy,” Miller replied.

“OK, so that was the secretary of energy’s mistake?” Keilar pressed.

“Well, I wouldn’t use the term mistake,” Miller said about the obvious error.

“I would say that it’s pretty standard when you’re downsizing government, you make cuts, you assess those cuts. You see who needs to be rehired, you see who needs to be kept, who needs to be reevaluated,” Miller continued, adopting Musk’s inane view that the best way to downsize was to cut off limbs of the system, and then simply wait to see whether it stops working—or something blows up.

“That’s not what happened here, though, Stephen. You know that. They were rescinded,” Keilar said.

“These are all normal things,” Miller continued.

“These aren’t normal things,” Keilar pushed.

“I understand that even a temporary interruption in federal employment is a great crisis and catastrophe for you, and for CNN,” Miller bit back, his mask slipping with a cold grin.

Keilar continued pushing back on Miller’s assertion that the DOGE cuts were a personal crisis, but an incensed Miller struggled to let her get through another question.

“Well, if I don’t think it’s a crisis, and you don’t think it’s a crisis, then why are we talking about it?” Miller fumed.

“It’s not my crisis, Stephen. I’m not a federal employee,” Keilar said.

As Miller continued to tout the supposed success of DOGE, he started screaming when Keilar wouldn’t say what he wanted her to.

“You may assert there’s no waste in the Pentagon!” he said. “You may assert there’s no waste in Treasury! You may assert—”

“Oh, Stephen, I’m not asserting, [I] don’t think anyone would assert that, Stephen,” Keilar interjected.

“Then WHY ARE YOU NOT CELEBRATING THESE CUTS? If you agree there is waste, if you agree there is abuse, if you agree there is corruption, why are you not celebrating the cuts, the reforms that are being instituted?” Miller cried. “Every day that no action is taken the entire salary of American workers that are taxed disappears forever.”

“Stephen, let’s calm down,” Keilar said. “We’re not having a debate—”

“Well, you are clearly trying to debate ME!” Miller glowered. “And I will be… as excited as I want to be about the fact that we are saving Americans billions of dollars.”

Keilar tried to ask Miller about whether DOGE employees would be able to access taxpayer bank accounts and personal information at the Internal Revenue Service. But again, he lost it.

“They will not be able to access anything that any other appropriately authorized federal employee could access,” Miller snapped. “When you keep talking about ‘DOGE employees,’ you’re just talking about federal workers!”

“Your question may as well be ‘can federal workers do their job?’” Miller fumed.

“No, that’s not what I’m asking,” Keilar interjected.

“Well, I’m telling you that that’s actually what you are asking!” Miller spit back.

When asked whether the research information systems (RIS) data would be used in Trump’s massive deportation scheme, Miller ranted a resounding, and incredibly hostile, yes.

“I’d have imagined that CNN, which has endlessly talked about the importance of democracy and the rule of law would say that no class in this country should be above the law, least of all illegal aliens who have trespassed on our territory!” he shouted.

“Stephen, I’m just asking,” Keilar said. “I wanted to get your position on some things, we’re not taking a position here.”

“It doesn’t sound to me like you are in fact indifferent or unbiased on these questions, but thank you,” Miller fumed.

The Trump administration has fired members of the “privacy team” at the Office of Personnel Management, a move that will hinder public access and scrutiny over government records related to the security clearances of Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency.

CNN discovered the terminations when it made a freedom of information act (FOIA) request to OPM looking for those records, particularly regarding DOGE workers who were granted access to classified or sensitive information. An OPM email address responded to CNN’s request and said, “Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team.”

OPM is the government agency tasked with overseeing and managing the entire federal workforce, and the privacy team’s job was to ensure that the agency follows the law with its data privacy practices and protects the trust of the public. The Trump administration not only fired those employees, but also members of OPM’s communications staff and the employees who handled FOIA requests, two unnamed sources told CNN.

When CNN reached out to OPM regarding the status of the privacy team, an official OPM told them that the entire privacy team wasn’t laid off, but didn’t elaborate further. The firings fit a pattern that started when Musk’s DOGE effort set its sights on the agency shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

Late last month, Musk’s cronies allegedly set up a private server at OPM headquarters and were sued for allegedly funneling federal employees’ private information to a Musk employee. Musk installed his own personal associates into high positions at the agency, and locked out the career employees who used to run the agency from its computer systems.

The latest moves suggest an effort to stifle transparency and keep much of DOGE’s activities and plans for the federal workforce hidden from the public. And with federal law enforcement also in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, there doesn’t seem to be much recourse.