August 29, 2025
Chaos continues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where President Donald J. Trump stepped in on Wednesday night to support Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his crusade to fire recently-confirmed Susan Monarez when she refused to rubber stamp his attack on vaccines.
With her ouster, three top scientists at the CDC resigned: Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases director Daniel Jernigan. “The CDC you knew is over,” Daskalakis said. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”
On Thursday, CDC staff and supporters rallied outside the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, whose windows are still pocked with bullet holes from a terrorist who had become convinced the coronavirus vaccine had injured him, to honor the resigning leaders.
In place of Monarez, the White House has appointed as acting CDC director Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor close to billionaire Peter Thiel and a former speechwriter at the Department of Health and Human Services during the presidential term of George W. Bush. O’Neill has no training in either medicine or the science of infectious diseases. As Maanvi Singh and Robert Mackey of The Guardian reported, O’Neill supported the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid despite no evidence that they worked. He also has embraced conspiracy theories about covid online.
The administration’s chaos extends to the Social Security Administration (SSA), where the administration forced Chief Data Officer Charles Borges to resign today. Borges had acted as a whistleblower for the agency when he identified serious data breaches that leave more than 300 million Americans at risk of identity theft and loss of benefits. In his resignation letter, Borges noted that he was leaving involuntarily after the administration had made it impossible to perform his duties legally and ethically and had caused him “serious attendant mental, physical, and emotional distress.”
In his letter, Borges noted that he has “served this Country for almost my entire adult life, first as an Active-Duty Naval Officer for over 22 years, and now as a civil servant. I was deployed during 9/11, decorated for valor in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and graduated from US Naval Test Pilot School. As a civil servant, I have served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, in the Centers for Disease Control during COVID, within [the Office of Management and Budget] on the Federal [Chief Information Officer] Data Team, and now serve as the SSA Chief Data Officer. I have served in each of these roles with honor and integrity.”
Makena Kelly and David Gilbert of Wired reported that less than 30 minutes after Borges’s resignation hit the in-boxes of SSA staff, it disappeared.
The removal of dedicated civil servants for trying to protect the public extends to the Environmental Protection Agency, where tonight the Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”
“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said. But, increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.
That includes the outing last week of an undercover intelligence officer, which has in the past been enough to lead to an indictment of an administration official. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the name of a senior undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer when she published a list of 37 current and former officials from whom she was stripping security clearances. Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard did not consult with the CIA before posting the list on X. At the time, Gabbard said she was acting on Trump’s orders.
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark took a step back today to look at the general operating system of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) part of the Trump administration and noted that it has always operated by throwing out wild conspiracies while actual scientists try to do the work of protecting America’s public health. Now, he notes, Kennedy and MAHA are the dog that caught the car. Faced with creating the new system that they promised voters would keep them healthier, they are flailing. Their key public-health report relied on fake studies concocted by AI, and Kennedy has slashed through advisory bodies and is currently limiting access to covid vaccines, all while the administration’s budget reconciliation bill is forcing people off health care insurance. Kennedy recently mused wildly about watching children in airports and realizing they have mitochondrial challenges.
Egger’s observation about MAHA fits MAGA as a whole. Trump and his ilk have spent years carping about how poorly the government is working and how much better they would be doing if they were the ones in charge. Voters gave them what they asked for, and now they appear to be unwilling or unable to do the actual work of governing. Instead, Trump and his cronies are simply declaring emergencies and then announcing policies they claim will address those emergencies. When their policies backfire or raise opposition, they claim they are being sabotaged by the deep state or that statistics are wrong.
This morning, the White House budget office announced it was unilaterally cancelling $4.9 billion in foreign aid funding passed by Congress. The Office of Management and Budget is overseen by director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, the plan from right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation designed to decimate the modern U.S. government and replace it with Christian nationalism.
The Constitution gives to Congress alone the power of spending money, and the executive branch has no authority to refuse to spend that money. Vought has argued that because the law permits the president to send to Congress a request to stop spending on certain items and gives Congress 45 days to consider the request, Trump can send a request with fewer than 45 days left before the end of the fiscal year and consider the request rubber stamped.
Both Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Patty Murray of Washington, who are the top two lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee, reject the move. Collins called it “a clear violation of the law.” Murray called it a “brazen attempt to usurp” the power of Congress.
Another major area in which Trump has simply done as he wished without regard for the law or economic reality is tariffs. The U.S. Constitution gives exclusively to Congress the power to impose tariffs, but in 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, often abbreviated as IEEPA, delegating to the president the power to adjust tariffs in times of national emergency. On February 1, Trump declared such a national emergency to impose tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and on April 2 he again invoked it for new blanket tariffs.
Congress could have ended Trump’s power over tariffs by cancelling the national emergency, a step Democrats were willing to take. But Republicans in the House used a procedural rule to make sure that Democrats could not cancel that emergency. A challenge to the president’s declaration of a national emergency must come to the floor for a vote within 18 days of the challenge. The House defanged that rule by declaring that each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”
Importers hit by the tariffs sued, along with Democratic-led states, and in May a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal. The IEEPA has “meaningful limits,” it wrote, and “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would be unconstitutional.” “Congress manifestly is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to other the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested,” the court wrote. It blocked the tariffs Trump imposed under the IEEPA. The administration appealed.
Today, by a 7–4 majority, a federal appeals court upheld the decision, striking down Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs. “[W]e conclude Congress, in enacting IEEPA, did not give the President wide-ranging authority to impose” sweeping tariffs, noting that such an authorization would mean “Congress had bestowed on a federal agency the taxing power.” Such an authorization would be “a sharp break with our traditions.”
The decision will not take effect until October 14 to allow the administration to appeal to the Supreme Court. For his part, Trump seemed to think the court would bend to his will, which is, in turn, based on an ideology that the last few months have proven demonstrably wrong. Shortly after the decision came down, Trump posted on social media:
“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end. If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country. It would make us financially weak, and we have to be strong. The U.S.A. will no longer tolerate enormous Trade Deficits and unfair Tariffs and Non Tariff Trade Barriers imposed by other Countries, friend or foe, that undermine our Manufacturers, Farmers, and everyone else. If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America. At the start of this Labor Day weekend, we should all remember that TARIFFS are the best tool to help our Workers, and support Companies that produce great MADE IN AMERICA products. For many years, Tariffs were allowed to be used against us by our uncaring and unwise Politicians. Now, with the help of the United States Supreme Court, we will use them to the benefit of our Nation, and Make America Rich, Strong, and Powerful Again! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/28/monarez-cdc-vaccines-rfk-trump-00533358
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/28/jim-oneill-cdc-profile?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cafc.23105/gov.uscourts.cafc.23105.159.0_1.pdf
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 29, 2025, 6:10 PM.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/08/29/epa-dissent-letter-employees-fired/
https://www.wired.com/story/charles-borges-resignation-email-disappearance/
https://www.advocate.com/politics/demetre-daskalakis-cdc-resignation-interview
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-28/trump-s-global-tariffs-blocked-by-us-trade-court
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-trade-court-0392dbd59f548e49ad4f64254ae3f94a
https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-04-08-can-congress-take-back-tariff-authority-from-trump/
X:
NickNehamas/status/1961507992857157861
Bluesky:
It's reported in the NYTimes that the Trump administration is planning to use military lawyers as judges in immigration courts. Giving martial law a new twist.
Also another step to destroying an independent judiciary.
Meanwhile, the Roberts Court, using the Shadow Docket, is giving Trump wins without hearing oral arguments or providing arguments for their unsigned decisions. Although Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have publicly castigated "the bad behavior of lower courts" deciding against the Trump administration and "forcing the Supreme Court" to come to the Republican regime's rescue.
It is time for Senate GOP Appropriations Chair Susan Collins to refuse to appropriate any new funding until all the funds impounded by Russell Vought are restored. Even if it means shutting down the government.
We have to fight this in the courts. Win or lose. We have to protest in the street. We. Have to gerrymander like our lives depend on it. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/the-damage-done?r=3m1bs