The hardworking folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are trying to rehire a number of federal employees who were laid off over the weekend. The employees were working on combating bird flu and were let go as part of a mass purge underway at every federal agency, spearheaded by American oligarch Elon Musk under the banner of DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency.”
“USDA continues to prioritize the response to highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI),” the agency said in a statement Wednesday to Gizmodo. “Several job categories, including veterinarians, animal health technicians, and other emergency response personnel have been exempted from the recent personnel actions to continue to support the HPAI response and other animal health priorities.”
The statement explained that many of the positions were in the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, exactly the kind of jobs you’d want to have good people for, given the possibility of meat and poultry infected with bird flu entering the U.S. food supply.
“Although several positions supporting HPAI were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” the USDA statement continued. “USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and we are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfill our statutory mission.”
H5N1 bird flu has become a growing concern among experts in recent months as more human cases are identified, though the current outbreak in birds and cattle started in 2022. The CDC’s online bird flu tracker currently shows 68 confirmed cases in humans and one death in the U.S. There have been no documented cases of bird flu jumping from human to human in this current outbreak, but there are worries that a mutation that allowed that kind of transmission would kick off a new pandemic.
There are currently two H5N1 genotypes that are spreading in the U.S. among animals, the B3.13 genotype which jumped from birds to cows, and the D1.1 genotype still found in birds. Humans who contract the B3.13 from cows have typically had mild flu-like symptoms, including conjunctivitis. Humans who contract the D1.1 genotype of bird flu have fared worse, with some of the most severe cases in Washington state and British Columbia, Canada being of that variety. America’s first bird flu death, a patient in Louisiana last month, was reportedly infected by backyard chickens with the D1.1 genotype.
There have been roughly 150 million birds euthanized in the U.S. during this current bird flu outbreak, something that has caused egg prices to soar in the country. And that may be the only reason many Americans know there’s an issue with bird flu at all. But it’s the people at USDA who make sure bird flu doesn’t get into the U.S. food supply who should be the absolute last people to get fired right now.
This isn’t the first time workers at federal agencies have been let go by Trump’s goons only to be rehired in a chaotic scramble. Roughly 300 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a subagency of the Department of Energy, were fired last week until somebody notified the Trump regime these are the people responsible for securing the nation’s nuclear stockpile, according to CNN.
And while a number of lawsuits to stop Trump and Musk from dismantling the government are currently being litigated, there have been some bad signs recently that the courts may not save us. For starters, several reports indicate Trump’s underlings simply aren’t following court orders when the judges rule against them. Judges are also not always finding in favor of people who are attempting to defend the country’s institutions right now.
Tanya Chutkan, a federal judge in Washington D.C., for instance, ruled on Tuesday that a suit brought by 14 attorneys general to stop Musk from dismantling the government hadn’t proved harm was actually occurring to necessitate an emergency injunction. Put another way, Musk and his minions are free to keep destroying the government, even if they fire a bunch of essential workers in the process.
