DOGE Gutted the Office Researching the Explosive Diarrhea Parasite

Donald Trump promised federal cuts under the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency would “drive out the massive waste.”

Indeed, waste is now being expelled on an incredible scale, across the country: A diarrhea-causing parasite, cyclosporiasis, has sickened thousands of people in more than two-thirds of U.S. states. And the outbreak’s severity—evidence increasingly shows—can be attributed at least partly to DOGE.

According to a Friday report by WIRED, DOGE cuts significantly reduced the size of the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. The lab was “downsized from 11 people to just three” last year, parasitologist Joel Barratt, who formerly led that operation, told the publication.

“Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” Barratt told WIRED. “Cyclospora is just one piece. It’s making the news right now, but there are other, more dangerous pathogens than cyclospora.”

That’s not the only way Trump’s cuts have hamstrung the response. In an analysis at The American Prospect, for example, Ryan Cooper details how the administration devastated American food safety and public health infrastructure in ways relevant to the outbreak.

Additionally, in July 2025, the CDC under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quietly changed the monitoring of cyclospora from mandatory to optional in Foodnet, its pathogen-tracking partnership with 10 state health departments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration.

With WIRED’s report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim Thursday that the administration’s funding cuts did not impact the response to the outbreak “at all” sounds more dubious than it already did.

Describing the wreckage left in DOGE’s wake, one GOP senator recently coined the phrase “DOGE shit.” The department’s increasingly apparent role in exacerbating this outbreak suggests there’s more mileage in that pun—a couple social media wordsmiths have already seized on it, nicknaming cyclospora “the DOGE shits.”

Despite recent evidence to the contrary, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear isn’t so sure that Senator Mitch McConnell is actually alive.

Speaking with journalist Katie Couric in an interview published on YouTube July 15, Beshear explained why he had requested a formal update from McConnell’s office earlier this month. In his explanation, Beshear revealed that he had received information from multiple officials indicating that the 84-year-old Republican had passed away.

“It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell,” Beshear recalled. “In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies—not state agencies—suggesting he’s passed.”

The Kentucky senator went missing for nearly a month after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, McConnell’s office refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill.

But the media blackout finally ended on Sunday, when the senator’s office shared a photo of McConnell sitting upright in a chair beside his wife, holding a copy of The Washington Post’s Sunday sports section in his lap.

Far-right influencers immediately jumped on McConnell’s statement, baselessly claiming that the picture had been AI-generated while demanding that McConnell release a video statement to address public concern. (Forensic analysis teams concluded that McConnell’s “proof of life” image was very much real and not AI-generated.)

McConnell’s team has not provided any further explanation or evidence supporting McConnell’s improving health condition since Sunday.

Earlier this week, Beshear held a press conference in which he acknowledged that while the July 12 update was a “step in the right direction,” McConnell ultimately needed to provide a more comprehensive update in order to cut through the resulting conspiratorial noise.

“We hope that there is a speedy recovery,” Beshear said on Tuesday. “But with all the speculation—and there’s been a ton—the fastest way to end all of it is calling into a news station if you’re otherwise taking calls, putting out a video or two, which all of us do in office.”

New details are emerging about the ICE agent who shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on Monday.

David Brouillette has a history of violent and abusive behavior, his relatives told the Associated Press, including attacks on the women and girls in his life. His first ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, said that she divorced him after he became violent with her while she was pregnant with their daughter.

In one instance, she told the AP, he threw boiling water at her while she was holding their daughter, which her mother, Avis Collins, also confirmed. In court records, another of Brouillette’s ex-wives also alleged years of physical and verbal abuse against her and her daughters. The AP did not identify her because she fears retaliation.

Brouillette’s second ex-wife said he stalked and harassed her, and engaged in physical and verbal abuse against his daughter, forcing them to seek temporary protection orders. Brouillette allegedly tackled his teenage daughter, smashed spaghetti in her hair, and one in instance, dragged her around the house while she was crying.

“Dave needs counseling or something for his PTSD & depression,” the ex-wife wrote while applying for a temporary protective order on behalf of Brouillette’s teenage daughter, which a judge granted in 2021.

Brouillette’s oldest daughter, Madison, also told the AP about her father’s mental health issues.

“I saw my dad struggle with a lot of things,” she said, recalling one instance where she came home from school and he told her that he had sat on a tree stump holding a gun to his head. “If you don’t really, truly take care of yourself, there’s no way you can protect other people. And with my dad, he never wanted to get help.”

One relative anonymously told the AP that Brouillette was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and severe bipolar disorder as a kid, which Ashley Brouillette confirmed. That relative said that David Brouillette was “extremely mentally ill,” attempting suicide when he was 12 years old and having to go to the hospital. His ex-wife Ashley shared a three-minute voicemail with the AP from last winter where he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.

In that message, sent around the time he joined ICE, he called her “disgusting” and said that she and other women and girls in her “bloodline” should die.

“And all of you should have your f—king throats cut,” Brouillette’s voicemail said. “Yeah, you should. Am I threatening that I’m gonna do that? Nope. Nope. But do I think that you should have your f—king throats cuts? Or should have had them cut? Yep.”

Brouillette reached out to Ashley and his daughter Madison after the shooting, telling them it was justified and that Durán Guerrero tried to run him over with a car. In those calls, he told his ex-wife to lie for him and to cover for his “character.” Based on his history, that was a lost cause.

Democrats across the country questioned the president’s fitness after his baseless, incendiary prime-time Thursday night speech accusing foreign agents of tampering with our last three elections—all to push his restrictive SAVE America Act.

“This is a 25th Amendment moment,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said, referring to the law that allows Congress to replace the president if deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the job. “I just watched the ramblings of a mad king, and what else can I say—the only thing missing was tinfoil. Donald Trump is trying to rig our elections, and we have to stop him. Show up and VOTE this November.”

“How can anyone deny the urgency of the 25th Amendment at this point,” echoed Representative Yassamin Ansari.

Others focused on the illegitimacy of the claims Trump made.

“Tonight I heard a failed and desperate president who as war spirals and prices rise is as always focused on his grievances, his shame, and above all his fear of the accountability that will come with defeat,” Senator Jon Ossoff wrote on X. “I also heard a president signaling his unmistakable intent to attack these elections and our voting rights, just as he tried to throw out our votes and seize the presidency in 2020. Our answer will be overwhelming.”

“Donald Trump is releasing unverified, meaningless documents to appease his own delusions about an election he lost resoundingly, all while continuing to withhold 3 million pages of the Epstein files,” wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Donald Trump is a feeble, unhinged conspiracy-peddling 80-year old failed President. The economy is a disaster under this guy and the American people know it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffires said. “Pathetic.”

“Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled,” said Representative Jim McGovern. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.”

“Donald Trump just used a primetime address to relitigate an election he lost six years ago—and to demand new laws making it harder to vote,” former gubernatorial candidate turned voting rights activist Stacey Abrams wrote. “Americans see through the lies. He tried this in Georgia first: a call to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ a raid on Fulton County, and now a war on the ballot itself. That’s not democracy. That’s cowardice. America, we’ve beaten it before.”

“Tonight, the same President who once badgered Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to find 11,780 votes that didn’t exist, so he could overtake Biden’s lead in the state in 2020, put out a whole new set of lies about our elections, past and present,” Senator and Trump nemesis Adam Schiff added. “All of his claims and the selective release of any documents must be treated with the greatest skepticism given the President’s many lies and misrepresentations about our elections.”

Outgoing GOP Representative Thomas Massie had some words for the president, as well.

“This is absurd,” he wrote. “Every piece of voter data Trump mentions here, as well as which elections each voter voted in, is readily available in Kentucky for a small fee.”

Trump’s rambling speech was as inaccurate as it was disconcerting. He sounded bad, had no energy, and stuck so closely to the teleprompter it seemed like he’d never seen the speech before he read it. Not exactly a vote of confidence for the next two years.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s meeting with several Epstein survivors was a major bust.

The Thursday meeting was an obvious gambit for Senate support for Blanche’s potential promotion to permanent attorney general.

The encounter was arranged hours after Republican Senator Thom Tillis said that his vote for Blanche’s confirmation would be predicated on whether the acting attorney general met with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.

During the second day of Blanche’s committee confirmation hearing, Epstein victim Dani Bensky warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that Blanche had dodged her and other victims for months, yet showed a sudden willingness to talk shop once he needed them to advance his Senate confirmation.

By 4 p.m., the meeting was a go, as several survivors were spotted filing into the Justice Department. Two hours later, however, they reappeared outside the building, looking “distraught and emotional,” according to MS NOW. Sky Roberts, the brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, informed reporters outside the Justice Department: “I think we have a little ways to go here.”

“It had absolutely nothing to do with us, and it had everything to do with Blanche checking a box so that he can get a promotion,” Epstein victim and anti–human trafficking educator Elizabeth Stein told the network. “I don’t think that we had high expectations going into this meeting. I certainly did not. But I didn’t expect to walk out of the meeting feeling the way that we feel right now.”

“It was demoralizing, to say the very least,” she added.

Stein recalled that Blanche was completely unwilling to provide the group with anything substantial, actively dodging questions and refusing to provide assurances that his department would follow up on potential investigative leads. She noted that he could not provide a concrete explanation for Ghislaine Maxwell’s cushy prison transfer to a low-security prison camp, and wouldn’t clarify the improper redactions rampant throughout the released Epstein files.

“It just felt like more political posturing and using survivors the way that we’ve been used as political pawns,” Stein continued. “We’re victims of the crime of sex trafficking. And the fact that our Department of Justice will not take that seriously is beyond concerning, not just to us, but should be concerning to Americans all across this country.”

Epstein survivor Annie Farmer told ABC News she is “even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States Attorney General” after finally meeting Blanche face to face.

“I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors—a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing,” said Farmer, who served as a key witness for the government during Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial.

Tillis did not feel the same way: The North Carolina senator indicated over social media Thursday evening that he was satisfied by Blanche’s efforts.

“I commend Todd Blanche for doing what all his predecessors over the last two decades never did: meet with the victims of Jeffery Epstein’s horrific crimes,” Tillis wrote. “I appreciate his willingness to directly engage and listen to them.”