Tag: workforce
RFK Jr

How Kennedy's FDA And CDC Cuts Imperil Your Family's Health

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. swung his meat axe at the Health and Human Services Department on Thursday, leaking plans to theWall Street Journal that he plans to lay off 10,000 workers or about 12 percent of the department’s workforce.

If he follows through on the plan, the largest layoffs will come at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the two sub-agencies that drew his greatest ire while running for president. The leaked plan calls for eliminating 3,500 full-time positions at FDA and 2,400 at CDC, which represents nearly 60 percent of the total employment cuts.

“If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags," Kennedy wrote on X last October after endorsing the Trump campaign.

The memo said the three divisions at FDA that approve new drugs, biologics and medical devices, which depend largely on industry user fees for their funding, would be exempt from the cuts. Those three sub-agencies employ 11,800 of the FDA’s total workforce of 19,700.

That means the bulk of the layoffs will come in the agency’s Human Food Program, which employs a little less than 8,000. Eliminating 3,500 its workers would nearly halve a sub-agency that protects the nation’s food supply; oversees food additives and dietary supplements; and crafts nutrition guidelines and food labels.

Staff who work in foods who were not exempted from the cuts include people who work on solving, communicating, and preventing outbreaks; testing foods for contaminants like heavy metals or bacteria; developing nutrition and food labeling policy; and take enforcement against companies who break the law.

Roughly two-thirds of Human Food Program funding goes towards inspection or ‘field’ personnel aimed at keeping our food supply safe, said Sarah Sorcher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in an email. (Full disclosure: I worked there from 2004-2009.) “Cuts are likely to hit heaviest on the foods program,” she said. “There are a few reviewers working on pre-market approval of additives, including food contact substances, (so) this is a very small fraction of the workforce.”

A corporate field day

No doubt the food additives regulatory function that Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign put in its crosshairs will be decimated. Eliminating workers without having an alternative regulatory scheme in place could prove disastrous for the American public.

First, the food and chemical additives industry will fight any attempt to ban or regulate their products, using its small army of lobbyists to slow the regulatory process before going to the business-friendly courts to prevent implementation. Second, the supplements industry will enjoy a field day after a sharp reduction in staff at FDA.

With fewer personnel to conduct oversight, shyster-led companies will fill the airwaves and internet with ads making unproven health claims for products that have never been tested for safety and efficacy. In addition to Kennedy’s long history questioning vaccine safety, Kennedy in recent years backed unproven medical claims such as taking cod liver oil for measles and ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for Covid.

If the Trump administration follows through on the cuts, Dr. Martin Makary, the newly confirmed head of FDA, will be handed a shattered agency incapable of carrying out many of its core functions. During his confirmation hearing, which took place shortly after the initial Elon Musk-ordered employment cuts at the agency were rolled back, Makary promised senators he would do his own assessment of personnel needs at the agency. This latest plan raises the obvious question of whether he played any role at all in evaluating staffing.

A surgeon by training, Makary during his hearing also revealed an affinity for blaming the marginal issues championed by his new boss for the rise in childhood illness, where the main problems in recent years have been identified as rising obesity caused by junk food diets and lack of exercise, environmentally-caused asthma and the return of once-conquered childhood illnesses due to vaccine hesitancy. When asked by a MAHA-friendly senator about the role food additives play in causing inflammation and gut microbiome alterations, Makary replied, “Half of our nation's children are sick and nobody has really been doing anything meaningful on this front … We have to look at those ingredients.”

States will be hit hard by CDC cuts

The employment cuts at CDC contained in the new Trump administration plan will eliminate an estimated 19 percent of all agency jobs. Many research functions, like the reports that go into the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, may fall by the wayside. Here’s the internet front page of a recent issue:

Public health agencies across the country, journalists and academic researchers rely on MMWR reports to identify emerging trends, deploy scarce resources, and identify issues that need further study. But Russell Vought, one of the key architects of Project 2025 and President Trump’s current director of the Office of Management and Budget, told Michigan’s Hillsdale College forum last September that most CDC workers “don’t even do public health. They are researchers that publish material. Who knows if it’s even relevant or not?”

Earlier this week, the administration announced it will cancel tens of billions of dollars in CDC grants to state and local health departments, which are dependent on federal funding to track infectious diseases, health disparities, vaccinations, mental health services, and other public health issues. It sent stop-work-immediately notices to the states, according to a news report in The Hill.

Many of the grants were authorized in the Covid relief bills passed during the Biden administration, which expire this September. Besides fighting the pandemic, state and local health officials used the money to also track the ongoing measles outbreak, improve their antiquated computer systems, and invest in other public health priorities.

States will soon become wholly dependent on their own resources to carry out these functions even as their residents continue to send most of their tax money to the federal government.

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News.


Elon Musk

How Trump And Musk Wrecked Social Security Program In Just Two Months

President Donald Trump and co-President Elon Musk's cuts to the Social Security Administration's workforce and operations have caused massive problems for the popular social safety net program that 73 million Americans depend on to afford their basic cost of living.

The Washington Post published a bombshell report on Tuesday, detailing the problems Musk has caused at the Social Security Administration through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

From the report:

The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. But the agency no longer has a system to monitor customers’ experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.[…]

The turmoil is leaving many retirees, disabled claimants and legal immigrants who need Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems.

The problems are thanks to a myriad of choices Musk has made to how the agency runs.

The Social Security Administration plans to cut roughly 7,000 employees—or 12 percent of its workforce—which current and former Social Security officials say could make it impossible for the program to keep up with the needs of the tens of millions of Americans who receive and apply for benefits annually.

“Everything they have done so far is breaking the agency’s ability to serve the public,” Martin O’Malley, who served as Social Security commissioner under former President Joe Biden, told The New York Times.

Musk and his DOGE bros also changed the way recipients can verify their identities to the agency, nixing the ability to do so over the phone and requiring the elderly and disabled people who receive benefits to do it either online or in-person. That’s an incredible burden for a population that is not as computer literate as others. It could also burden recipients who live in rural areas or areas with poor internet access. Going in person would be even more of a burden since many elderly and disabled recipients cannot travel to offices—if they could even get an appointment.

A memo obtained by the newsletter Popular Information said the new identity-verification procedure would lead an additional 75,000 to 85,000 weekly visits to agency offices. In turn, that would lead to “longer wait times and processing times,” the memo said. Already, wait times for appointments can be more than a month.

Musk has had it out for Social Security since his buddy Trump put him in charge of finding waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.

Musk criticized the social safety net program as a “Ponzi scheme.” He lied that the program is rife with fraud—lies that have led eligible people to lose benefits. He also helped force out the acting Social Security administrator and replace him Leland Dudek, an unqualified hothead who has acted vindictively since taking over.

For example, Dudek canceled a contract that allowed new parents in Maine to apply for Social Security numbers for their newborn infants at the hospital—a move that would have forced those parents to travel to a Social Security office to obtain. He seemingly did it to punish Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat who stood up to Trump at a meeting with governors.

Dudek also threatened to shut the entire Social Security Administration down because he was mad that a judge blocked DOGE officials from accessing Americans’ sensitive personal information as they sought to prove Musk’s baseless lies that the agency is rife with fraud.

Musk isn’t the only Trump administration official attacking Social Security.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick disparaged the program and accused anyone who has had problems receiving benefits as being "fraudsters."

"Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She thinks something got messed up and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming, yelling, and complaining. And all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen,” Lutnick—who is a billionaire and could easily ensure his mother-in-law wouldn’t face financial ruin if her Social Security check went missing—said on a podcast.

Musk’s attacks on the overwhelmingly popular social safety net program goes against Trump’s claim that he would protect Social Security if elected.

And breaking Social Security is politically moronic. It is one of the most popular programs in the country.

Eighty-seven percent of Americans ages 25 and older believe that Social Security should be a priority for the nation, regardless of governmental budget deficits, according to an October 2023 poll from Greenwald Research for the National Institute on Retirement Security, a nonpartisan research organization. And a more recent poll, conducted by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that 67 percent of Americans believed the government spends too little on Social Security. Only six percent said too much is spent on the program.

What’s more, older voters who receive Social Security benefits are among the most reliable voting blocs in the country. That means a backlash from those voters could sink Republicans chances in the 2026 midterm elections. In 2024, Trump won voters ages 65 and older by just one percentage point, according to exit polls, so even a modest backlash from that voting group could heavily damage Republicans next November.

And the signs that the backlash is coming are already showing up. Older voters are packing into Republican lawmakers’ town halls to demand they stand up to Musk’s DOGE cuts.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Leland Dudek

Acting Social Security Chief Prepares To Fire Half Of Agency Workforce

The new acting administrator of the Social Security Administration (SSA) is now announcing that he's carrying out "significant workforce reductions" at the critical agency that oversees trillions of dollars in payments to tens of millions of beneficiaries.

According to a Thursday article in The American Prospect, Leland Dudek, who took over as acting administrator after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) forced out the initial acting administrator earlier this month, has ordered all SSA managers present him with plans to reduce their respective headcounts by up to 50 percent. The email Dudek sent Thursday evening announcing "agency-wide organizational restructuring" does not indicate any plans to deviate from that goal. The SSA currently employs roughly 60,000 people, who process benefits for more than 71 million Americans as of 2023.

Dudek's email gives all SSA employees a deadline of March 14 to decide whether to retire early, resign or seek what Propsect executive editor David Dayen referred to as "voluntary reassignments." Workers aged 50 and up who have been with the agency for at least 20 years are reportedly being offered an "early out" voluntary retirement, which is a quicker timeline than that generally offered to employees of other federal agencies.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes responded to the news of Dudek's email by tweeting: "Just to be clear, these count as 'cuts to Social Security!' If you cut the way the program is administered, you're cutting it!" And Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson told the Prospect that the mass firings of Social Security workers amount to "Wall Street and the billionaires destroying Social Security so they can give themselves trillions in tax handouts."

"The ongoing bloodbath at the Social Security Administration has only one goal: the total annihilation of Social Security," Lawson said.

The Prospect reported that if the mass layoffs are carried out, it could result in "large delays in benefit adjudication and claims processing" for beneficiaries. The Social Security Fairness Act — which former President Joe Biden signed into law just weeks before he left office — could increase benefits for more than three million Americans. However, some of its provisions may require manual processing of benefits, which could take significantly longer if the SSA doesn't have enough staff.

Dudek replaced Michelle King as acting administrator in February after she refused to hand over sensitive Social Security information to DOGE representatives. The Washington Post reported that Dudek, who previously worked in SSA's fraud prevention office, leapfrogged several senior SSA officials to helm the agency. Dudek had previously praised DOGE's efforts on social media, according to the Post's sources.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Out Of The Job Market, Many Working-Age Men Aren’t Coming Back

Out Of The Job Market, Many Working-Age Men Aren’t Coming Back

By Don Lee and Samantha Masunaga, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Millions of workers who dropped out of the job market during the last economic slump were supposed to jump back in once things turned around. But more than six years after the recession ended, the missing millions are increasingly looking like they’re gone for good.

The nation’s labor participation rate — defined as the share of the working-age population that is either working or looking for work — hasn’t budged from a 38-year-low of 62.6 percent this summer. And most experts don’t see an upswing on the way.

The reasons include the nation’s aging population, swelling ranks of people on disability and the changing nature of jobs. But one of the biggest factors has to do with men in the prime of their work lives, particularly those with less education.

Mitchell Johnson of Hawthorne, Calif., has been unemployed since 2012, when he completed an 11-month construction training program. Married without children, the 26-year-old high school graduate blames it partly on the fact that he isn’t a union member. Johnson says he could probably find low-wage work at a restaurant or retail store, but he is holding out for something better.

“I’m going for a career job,” he said. For now, he volunteers at a community work center and relies on sporadic side jobs like house painting and his wife’s income from her job at a department store. “I got people to help me out,” Johnson said.

Labor participation for men ages 25 to 54 has been declining for decades but sped up during the recession with large-scale layoffs in construction and manufacturing. Their growing withdrawal from the job market is especially worrisome because it carries significant social and economic costs.

Collectively, these trends indicate that the U.S.’s potential workforce — and thus productive capacity — may be considerably smaller than previously thought. Some economists have long argued that the true unemployment figure is a few percentage points higher than the government-reported rate, currently 5.1 percent, because officials don’t count people as unemployed if they’re not actively looking for work.

But more and more experts are concluding that the great flight of workers in recent years isn’t going to reverse.

Meanwhile, many workers who have been able to land only part-time jobs are finding that a stronger economy doesn’t necessarily lead to more work hours. The number of part-time workers wanting to work full time remains unusually high today, and there’s some evidence that this increase since the recession is largely permanent.

If there are millions more jobless workers than the unemployment rate would indicate, the thinking went, the Fed could keep stimulating the economy with super-low interest rates to help absorb more of the unemployed without worrying about inflation shooting higher. The Fed’s benchmark interest rate has been pinned near zero since the depths of the recession in December 2008.

But though economic growth has been slow and uneven, employers have added new jobs at a fairly steady and solid pace in recent years — about 8 million since mid-2012. The unemployment rate has fallen from a high of 10 percent in October 2009 to 5.1 percent last month, very close to what many economists see as an optimum level before inflation pressures build.

Unemployment varies widely across the country, from 4 percent or lower in many towns in Iowa and Minnesota to double digits in some places in Central California. Still, the overall improvement has been impressive. This summer, there were about 63 job openings for every 100 officially unemployed people. A few years ago it was just 16 openings for every 100.

In the past, a recovering economy usually meant rising labor participation as more people gained confidence and got off the sidelines and into the job market. But not this time. The share of the population 16 years and over in the workforce was 66 percent in December 2007 when the economy fell into recession, and it has ticked down every year since then to 62.6 percent the last three months.

If the U.S. had the same labor participation rate today as in late 2007, the nation’s workforce would be roughly 8 million higher more than the July figure of about 157 million.

The severity of 2007-09 recession and major concurring shifts in the nation’s demographics have made it hard to predict labor trends. Many economists, including those at the Fed, now estimate that about half of the decline in labor participation has been due to the aging of the large population of baby boomers, the oldest of whom turned 69 this year.

Labor participation rates are lower for workers as they get closer to retirement age. And the economic downturn forced even more older workers to drop out of the labor force; anecdotal reports abound of laid-off workers taking early retirement.

At the same time, young adults have delayed their entry into the job market, further depressing labor participation. College enrollment rates were rising before the recession, and the weak recovery has pushed more people to stay in school longer while others who were laid off went back for training.

Many people not in the labor force are working off the books or at temporary jobs or as freelancers, making it difficult to track their employment status. Moreover, decades-old structural problems, including access to public transportation and affordable child care, continue to keep some workers, both male and female, from the workforce.

Berny and Dora Motto of Echo Park have been surviving on savings and unemployment benefits since he was laid off in June as a field deputy for L.A. City Councilman Bernard Parks, who was termed out of office.

Berny, 47, has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from his native El Salvador and remains very engaged in the job market; he has had interviews and is anticipating callbacks from some of them. Dora, was a dentist in El Salvador but isn’t looking for work now. She takes care of their two young daughters at home.

“The last two months have been very, very difficult,” Berny Motto said, adding that he and his wife even considered returning to El Salvador.

Many immigrants come to the U.S. for economic opportunities, and often have a higher engagement with the labor market than the native-born population. But participation rates have fallen for the foreign-born as well, as they have for almost every demographic group with the notable exception of older workers, especially those over 65.

Labor participation for women 25 to 54, which had risen steadily from the 1960s through 2000, fell back to 73.7 percent this summer from 75.5 percent in late 2007.

The drop has been sharper for men in that age group — to 88 percent from 90.9 percent at the end of 2007. At its peak in the mid-1950s, labor participation for men in their prime working age was nearly 98 percent.

The drop-off of men from the workforce continues to dismay policy experts and economists.

“Those are the ones I find most surprising,” said Sophia Koropeckyj, a labor economist at Moody’s Analytics. She still expects labor participation overall to rise a bit in the coming months as employers keep adding jobs and rising earnings draw more people into the workforce.

Most economists aren’t so optimistic. The aging of baby boomers, the youngest of whom are 51 this year, will be a big drag on labor participation rates for years to come. And there’s little indication yet that the decline of men in the work world has stopped.

In a paper in 2013 titled “Wayward Sons,” MIT economist David Autor said that the U.S. economic landscape was undergoing a “tectonic shift.” While women over the decades have gained ground in education and economic measures, including labor participation, men have fallen behind, Autor noted. That’s made them less attractive as partners and has perpetuated a vicious cycle in which children living in low-income single-parent households are headed predominantly by women, who in turn raise sons with poorer prospects for social, education and economic advancement.

“Although a significant minority of males continues to reach the highest echelons of achievement in education and labor markets, the median [or average] male is moving in the opposite direction,” he wrote in the paper with Melanie Wasserman, a graduate student.

That’s particularly worrisome in an economy driven by global competition and rapid changes in technology. “A male high school graduate in America has almost nothing an employer is going to value,” said Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University professor and former chief economist at the Labor Department. He noted that many men and the U.S. economy at large would benefit from stronger vocational and technical programs at schools, with apprenticeships and other career paths.

“On average, low-income, at-risk young men don’t do as well just sitting in a classroom,” Holzer said. “I think a lot of these men would do better if we offered them high-quality work-based education.”

Photo: Fewer males are doing this, and the reasons are complicated and varied, but it all points to a worrisome trend. Lynn Friedman/Flickr

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