RFK Jr. Reveals DOGE Fired Some People by Mistake

A fifth of the jobs slashed at the Department of Health and Human Services were actually a mistake, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.

Under the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the health agency fired some 10,000 employees this week in an ongoing government reduction effort that Kennedy has said could downsize his department’s 82,000-employee workforce by as much as a quarter.

But by Kennedy’s own admission, that process is apparently so haphazard, rushed, and inefficient that it basically has to involve major mistakes that undermine the department’s work.

“Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday. “We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.”

Kennedy noted that some of the employees affected were not in administrative roles, as DOGE had promised, and that the layoff had affected the agency’s research work. One such program included a team of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that monitors lead exposure in children.

“There were some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” Kennedy said.

Other shuttered departments were responsible for research and policy recommendations on older adults, disabilities, HIV, minority health, mine safety, and smoking. It is unclear if these are among the research priorities that will return.

The negligent error is just one recent instance in which the “shock and awe” of the Trump administration’s federal makeover has resulted in dud details and mass confusion.

Since January, the Trump administration has fired more than 100,000 federal employees, killing the Education Department and attacking the Environmental Protection Agency. Mass layoffs were also conducted at the Department of Energy in February, where DOGE similarly and mistakenly nixed critical workers focused on nuclear safety.

Bringing those employees back wasn’t as easy as simply having them return to work the next day. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration were reportedly considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

But tens of thousands more government jobs are expected to be on the chopping block as Trump pursues a second round of “voluntary” buyouts in the coming weeks.

The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf, condemned the Health Department layoffs in a statement on LinkedIn.

“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Califf wrote, describing the action as “a dark day for public health.”

Donald Trump is defending his tariff plan with poorly sourced hype videos.

The president shared an X video, a copy of a TikTok post, to his Truth Social account Friday morning calling his economic plans “genius” without much substance. The video starts out by saying Trump is crashing the economy on purpose and that billionaire investor Warren Buffett is praising the president for making “the best economic moves he’s seen in 50 years.”

This isn’t true at all, though. Last month, Buffett openly called Trump’s tariffs “a tax on goods” in an interview.

“Tariffs are actually, we’ve had a lot of experience with them. They’re an act of war, to some degree,” Buffett said. “I mean, the tooth fairy doesn’t pay ’em! And then what? You always have to ask that question in economics. You always say, ‘And then what?’”

Trump’s video goes on to make several other unsourced claims, including that the Federal Reserve will be forced to slash interest rates in May, allowing trillions of dollars in debt to be refinanced inexpensively. The video also claims that the dollar will be weakened and that mortgage rates will drop, and repeats Trump’s claims that tariffs will compel businesses to build in the U.S. and force farmers to sell more crops stateside as well. There is no indication that any of this will happen. Indeed, Trump is practically begging—or maybe threatening—Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to slash rates.

The video shows that Trump is deluded that his tariffs are going to succeed and is pushing any source that backs him up. The TikTok account that the video comes from lacks credibility, as it doesn’t even have a bio and seems to only post summary videos of news events without any indication of who is making them. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to plummet and Americans continue to worry about their jobs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent may be planning to cut and run after Donald Trump’s disastrous “reciprocal tariff” announcement earlier this week.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Friday, contributor Stephanie Ruhle reported that the key Cabinet member is already looking for an escape hatch.

“My sources say that Scott Bessent is kind of the odd man out here and, in the inner circle that Trump has, he’s not even close to Scott Bessent or listening to him,” Ruhle said. “Some have said to me, he’s looking for an exit door to try to get himself to the Fed, because in the last few days he’s really hurting his own credibility and history in the markets.”

To be sure, Trump’s tariff policy represents a sort of defeat for Bessent, a former hedge fund manager who entered office under the delusion that he might actually succeed in stopping Trump from wrecking the economy. Should he flee the administration now, he would likely forfeit what little credibility remains.

Bessent warned other countries Wednesday not to make any rash decisions in reaction to Trump’s sweeping “retaliatory tariff” policy, which included a 10 percent baseline tariff on almost every country in the world.

“My advice to every country right now is: Do not retaliate. Sit back, take it in, let’s see how it goes. Because if you retaliate, there will be escalation. If you don’t retaliate, this is the high-water mark,” he warned.

Bessent’s warning came off particularly clueless given that democratically elected foreign leaders are likely beholden to their electorate, who won’t take lightly to Trump’s blatant bullying.

Ruhle’s sources told her Bessent must understand just how ridiculous Trump’s tariff policy is because he “actually understands how the markets work, and what’s happening right now is only going to hurt markets,” she said.

And it already has: The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite experienced their single worst sessions since 2020 on Thursday. Bessent’s nomination had received strong Republican support because of his experience with financial markets.

“And even for Scott Bessent to say a few weeks ago, you know, getting cheap goods fast is ‘not part of the American dream.’ No, it’s not part of the American dream, but it’s part of the way Americans live, especially people who are economically vulnerable,” Ruhle said. “They don’t have the option to say, ‘No, I’d like higher things that cost more.’ They need low-cost things because they don’t make that much money.”

Already, countries are ignoring Bessent’s weak warning. China announced Friday that it would impose a reciprocal 34 percent tariff on all imports from the U.S. Trump had levied two rounds of 10 percent duties on all Chinese imports, and then an additional 34 percent tariff on Wednesday. It’s easy to see how prices can quickly add up for working- and middle-class Americans who have relied on cheap products from countries like China.

Before he was nominated to serve in the Trump administration, Bessent had defended the use of tariffs as a form of sanctions. He told Bloomberg in August that tariffs were a “one-time price adjustment” and were “not inflationary.”

“I think that tariffs in a way can be regarded as an economic sanction without a sanction. If you don’t like Chinese economic policy, flooding the market with over production, you could put a sanction on them, or a tariff,” Bessent said at the time.

Donald Trump is looking for a scapegoat to redirect America’s tariff fury.

The president attempted to influence Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ahead of the head banker’s remarks Friday, insisting that the chairman should cut interest rates.

“This would be a PERFECT time for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut Interest Rates,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “He is always ‘late,’ but he could now change his image, and quickly.”

Trump then claimed that energy prices, interest rates, inflation, and egg prices are down. (Energy prices, interest rates, and inflation are actually not down. Egg prices, however, are $3 a dozen again.) The president also claimed that jobs are “up,” likely referring to the jobs report he celebrated earlier Friday that assessed positive job growth in the U.S. economy before he implemented tariffs that cratered the stock market.

“A BIG WIN for America,” Trump wrote. “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!”

Rate cuts, however, would not be an imminent and forthcoming solution to the market chaos, according to the chairman.

“We don’t need to be in a hurry,” Powell said later Friday. “We are well positioned to wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments to our policy stance. It is too soon to say what will be the appropriate path for monetary policy.”

Overall, Powell’s speech did not spell good news in the wake of Trump’s sweeping tariff plan. Powell described Trump’s tariffs as “significantly larger than expected” and predicted that the levies would contribute to—at minimum—a “temporary rise in inflation,” though he noted that the “effects could be more persistent.”

The decision to cut interest rates or not was a major sticking point between Trump and Powell toward the end of Trump’s first term, when the Covid-19 pandemic sent the economy on a roller-coaster ride.

Economists have predicted that the tariffs could throw the U.S. into a recession. Trump’s plan has been interpreted around the globe as an economic attack, forcing the leaders of some of America’s longest-term allies to turn away from U.S. leadership.

“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States … is over,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday, as if delivering a eulogy for the two nations’ relationship, the day after Trump unveiled the plan.

“Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over,” Carney said. “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over.”

A new poll has Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez handily beating Senator Chuck Schumer head-to-head in the 2028 New York primary.

Fifty-five percent of likely Democratic voters preferred Ocasio-Cortez according to the survey, which was conducted by the liberal group Data for Progress, while 36 percent preferred Schumer. Nine percent went undecided.

This underscores the reputational damage Schumer has taken in the early days of Trump’s second term, particularly after he decided to advance a GOP spending bill without seeking concessions rather than shut down the government, completely capitulating to Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s extremist agenda. Schumer argued that shutting the government down was a worse look than giving Trump a blank check, but the Democratic base disagrees.

“I think that’s absolutely wrong. Republicans control the House, they control the Senate, they control the Oval Office. They’d be voting against our measure to keep the government open,” Senator Jeff Merkley said at the time. “I think America would understand that this is a Republican shutdown, if there was a shutdown.… You don’t stop a bully by handing over your lunch money, and you don’t stop a tyrant by giving them more power.”

This poll also emphasizes the ideological struggle that rages on within the Democratic Party. While Schumer and other moderates cancel book tours and blame the party’s “woke” left, Ocasio-Cortez had been barnstorming towns with Bernie Sanders, railing against oligarchy and making the progressive case for the party’s future.

Schumer’s approval rating among Democrats is currently 48 percent, the lowest it’s been since 2019.

Senator Ted Cruz apparently has a limit on what he will tolerate from President Trump, and tariffs cross it.

The Trump sycophant told Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow Thursday that he didn’t think the president’s insane tariffs were a good idea, calling them “a tax on consumers.”

“I’m not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers,” Cruz said. “So my hope is these tariffs are short-lived and they serve as leverage to lower tariffs across the globe.

“Look, I think it is a mistake to assume that we will have high tariffs in perpetuity. I don’t think that would be good economic policy,” Cruz added. “I am not a fan of tariffs.”

Cruz qualified his comments, saying that if the tariffs cause trading partners to “dramatically reduce the tariffs they charge on U.S. goods, and services, and the consequence of that is the U.S. government dramatically cuts the tariffs that were announced yesterday, that would be a great outcome.

“But if the result is our trading partners jack up their tariffs and we have high tariffs everywhere, I think that is a bad outcome for America,” said the Texas senator.

Cruz’s mild criticism shows that even he sees the danger in blowing up the economy over a half-baked idea. Ever since his loss to Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Cruz has almost slavishly supported the president, even after Trump called his wife ugly and linked Cruz’s father to the John F. Kennedy assassination. But the Texas senator knows that tariffs will hurt his constituents, who depend on trade with Mexico, living in a border state. The question is whether he and his fellow Republicans are prepared to take legislative action over it.

Republicans aren’t happy about Donald Trump’s tariffs tanking the stock market.

In an appearance on Fox Business Friday, Senator Ron Johnson said he was worried about the direction the market was headed, after Trump’s announcement of sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to experience its biggest wipeout since 2020.

“From my standpoint, I’m certainly concerned about what’s happening right now in the markets, and I hope the administration is looking at it as well,” Johnson said.

Johnson noted that while Trump was convinced that tariffs were the answer to the country’s economic woes, “what’s also indisputable is the markets are down about 8 percent in just two days.

“I’m getting all kinds of reactions from businesses, farmers in Wisconsin that are highly concerned about what’s happening. So, those are the facts; all I can really do is report the reality to the administration, let them know how these actions are impacting my constituents,” he said.

Johnson said Trump’s tariff policy was a “bold, risky move.” Meanwhile, analysts at JP Morgan have raised their recession forecasts for the next year from 40 percent to 60 percent.

Unfortunately for the Wisconsin Republican, Trump seemed completely unbothered by the major stock market tumble.

“I think it’s going very well,” the president told reporters Thursday. “It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on, and it’s a big thing. I said this would be exactly the way it is.

“The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom, and the rest of the world wants to see, is there any way they can make a deal?” Trump added.

While White House aides have insisted that the administration is not open to negotiating on tariff rates, Trump has begun signaling that he is willing to cut deals, according to CNBC.

Trump’s new tariff policy is so unpopular in the Senate that it’s actually bringing together Democrats and Republicans.

On Wednesday night, the Senate passed a rare bipartisan rebuke of Trump, with four Republican senators joining the Democrats to approve a resolution that would limit the president’s ability to impose tariffs on Canada.

Senator Rand Paul appeared on Fox News Wednesday beside Democratic Senator Tim Kaine to criticize Trump’s tariffs, specifically the 25 percent tariff imposed on imports from Canada.

“Trade is proportional to wealth. The last 70 years of international trade has been an exponential curve upward, and the last 70 years of prosperity has been upward also,” the Kentucky Republican said. “We are richer because of trade with Canada, and so is Canada.”

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana told CNN’s Manu Raju Wednesday that he was concerned about Trump’s decision to play the long game.

“In the long run, we’re all dead. Short run matters too,” Kennedy said. “Nobody knows what the impact of these tariffs is going to be on the economy.”

Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina warned that the economic pain threshold wasn’t the same for everyone. “Anyone who says there may be a little bit of pain before we get things right, needs to talk to my farmers who are one crop away from bankruptcy,” Tillis said.

On Thursday, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley co-sponsored a bill with Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat, that would allow Congress to review Trump’s tariffs. If passed, the Trade Review Act of 2025 would require Trump to give Congress 48 hours notice of tariffs he planned to impose and provide a 60-day window for Congress to approve the tariff or else have it scrapped.

In a post on X Thursday, Grassley insisted that his support of the bill was not a response to Trump’s tariffs. “If u r trying to make the Trade Review Act about current events/Trump tariffs U R MISSING THE MARK I’ve long expressed my view that congress has delegated too much authority on trade to the executive branch under Republican & Democrat presidents,” he wrote.

Donald Trump will be fine dining Friday, instead of attending a ceremony for four fallen U.S. soldiers.

The commander in chief chose to attend the LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida Thursday night, financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, flying over Delaware’s Dover Air Force base where four service members who died on training grounds in a Lithuanian swamp were being honored.

Those soldiers include 25-year-old Sergeant Jose Duenez Jr. of Joliet, Illinois; 25-year-old Sergeant Edvin F. Franco of Glendale, California; 21-year-old Private First Class Dante D. Taitano of Dededo, Guam; and 28-year-old Staff Sergeant Troy S. Knutson-Collins of Battle Creek, Michigan.

The M88 Hercules armored recovery vehicle the team had been using was discovered 16 feet underground, a day after the soldiers went missing, but the massive machinery took days to unearth in its entirety. The last soldier’s body was recovered Tuesday, capping a weeklong search by hundreds of personnel in the U.S. military and Lithuania’s emergency services.

The soldiers were honored during a dignified departure ceremony in Lithuania attended by Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda. Trump’s decision to not attend the arrival ceremony suggests that the U.S. military leader cares less about America’s armed forces than the leaders of foreign countries.

Meanwhile, this very important dinner kicks off a three-day LIV Golf tournament hosted at Trump National Doral Golf Club.

Trump has had a bad history with honoring the Army’s dead. In 2020, HuffPost reported that Trump stopped attending dignified transfers after the father of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens refused to meet or shake Trump’s hand. Owens died during a controversial raid on Yemen that Trump greenlit just one week into his first term.

“I told them I don’t want to meet the president,” Bill Owens told the Miami Herald at the time. Owens would go on to accuse Trump of trying to “hide behind my son’s death” in order to avoid an investigation into the incident.

But it’s possible that the deceased servicemen don’t matter at all to Trump. Last week, the president was caught completely in the dark more than 24 hours after the soldiers first went missing.

At an Oval Office news briefing, Trump casually admitted that he was not aware that the U.S. army members had disappeared during a training exercise in Lithuania.

“Have you been briefed about the soldiers in Lithuania who are missing?” a reporter asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Trump said, failing to offer the soldiers or their families any well wishes.

Trump is slated to visit Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks, marking his first trip abroad since reentering the White House, reported The Wall Street Journal. Saudi Arabia is currently the center of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

The Trump administration is attempting to use the positive jobs report from March to assuage widespread economic panic over the unprecedented trade war the president launched on Wednesday.

“Today’s jobs report shows the private sector is roaring back under President Donald J. Trump—smashing expectations for the second straight month as the Golden Age of America is well on its way,” the White House announced in a press release emailed to reporters with the subject line “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS.” “In March, the U.S. added 228,000 jobs—nearly 100,000 more jobs than economists predicted and the fourth-highest month for private payroll growth in the past two years.… The report highlights a resilient labor market as companies aggressively onshore jobs amid President Trump’s bold trade and economic agenda.”

The administration’s rhetoric is the living embodiment of the “This is fine” burning-house meme. It’s baffling to watch it try to fool Americans with this faux excitement over a jobs report as the stock market craters, panic grows, and tariff-related layoffs begin. How can manufacturers hire more, how can consumers continue to spend and invest when everything across the board becomes more expensive?

“GREAT JOBS NUMBERS, FAR BETTER THAN EXPECTED. IT’S ALREADY WORKING,” the president wrote on X, referring to his massive tariffs on virtually every U.S. trading parter. “HANK TOUGH, WE CAN’T LOSE.” (Trump later changed his misspell from ‘Hank” to “Hang.”)

“GREAT NEWS! The economy is starting to roar with a strong 228,000 jobs added in the month of March—well ahead of the market’s expectation,” wrote press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “There was also a sharp increase in transportation, construction, and warehousing employment. The President’s push to onshore jobs here in the United States is working. The Golden Age of America is on its way!”

These are insane messages to broadcast to the country as fears of stagflation set in. Even Trump’s cheerleaders at Fox Business weren’t buying the fake joy over last month’s jobs numbers.

“These numbers aren’t gonna make any difference at all,” one host said plainly. “What the market is worried about is what’s gonna happen in the future. Who’s gonna hire now in this uncertain environment? I think people are very very concerned, and that’s why … we need to get to work, we need to act on negotiating now, we need to get tax cuts now, we need to get deregulation now before this gets out of control the other way.”

“We want as quick a deal on these tariffs as soon as possible because every country would benefit,” another host chimed in. But Trump himself has made it crystal clear that there will be no deal—or, for that matter, negotiations. These tariffs are final, and help is not on the way.

Analysts at the world’s largest bank say that a recession is more likely to happen than not.

Analysts at JP Morgan, the marketing side of JP Morgan Chase & Co., adjusted their prediction Thursday that the United States would experience a recession in the next year, raising their forecasts to a whopping 60 percent from an already troubling 40 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This decision comes after Donald Trump announced sweeping 10 percent tariffs on imports from nearly every country in the world, with additional country-specific tariffs levied on top.

Analysts predicted that retaliatory tariffs could lead to huge disruptions in the supply chain and that the tariff rate, which they expect to increase by 20 percentage points, would be equivalent to the biggest tax hike since 1968, which also led to a recession, according to Reuters.

Trump’s announcement continued to send the stock market tumbling Thursday, amid concerns over a global trade war. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1,679.39 points, marking its worst session since June 2020, while the Nasdaq Composite saw its steepest drop since March 2020.

When Trump was asked about the crashing markets Thursday, he responded, “I think it’s going very well.” Blatant denial seems to be the name of the game, messaging-wise, as the White House insisted that it was not watching the market.

Trump also enacted a “permanent” 25 percent tariff on all imported vehicles and autoparts—which is already kneecapping the U.S. auto industry. The president has already levied steep 25 percent tariffs on America’s closest trading partners, Mexico and Canada.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Thursday that the era of U.S. global leadership on trade was “over,” and said his country would begin looking elsewhere for trade partnerships.