Everyone knows that federal government bureaucrats hate Trump. He’s the antithesis of them.
And now Donald Trump’s preparing for sweet revenge against the Washington, D.C. Swamp.
The entire Donald Trump presidency was characterized by rogue federal government agents seeking to stonewall any progress the Trump administration was trying to make. From day one, there were officials in countless federal agencies taking matters into their own hands to make Donald Trump’s life as president a nightmare.
The 2020 pandemic panic, in particular, truly shows how federal agencies were dead-set on taking power away from Trump and company. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Center for Disease Control which worked very closely with Dr. Fauci, effectively took over control of the nation by being able to whip out any “recommended” health policy that the entire nation was forced to accept without any question.
There’s absolutely a valid criticism conservatives have for the way Donald Trump handled the entire situation, sure. He absolutely should have been stronger in his support for basic freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment that were being stripped away from Americans in the name of so-called “public safety.”
In fact, Donald Trump himself has said that if he knew everything he does now, he would’ve approached the 2020 pandemic panic much differently. Now there’s rumors that Donald Trump is going to be seeking revenge for the way that all played out.
According to Politico, a former Trump administration official for the Department of Health & Human Services has said that Donald Trump might take an axe to the CDC and split it in two.
The plan would be to establish one agency that would handle the data of health trends while the other would be responsible for the “public health recommendations.” The separation of the two would be critical to prevent any abuse on the part of the federal government.
They are letting us know, the CDC is "in the crosshairs"
The CDC could shrink under a second Trump administration
A CDC reorganization as some conservatives are calling for could impact the agency’s ability to help prevent or mitigate the spread of disease, according to a… pic.twitter.com/GDy8EDrir4
— floridanow1 (@floridanow1) March 11, 2024
Politico reports:
One agency responsible for public health surveillance work, like data collection on outbreaks and another responsible for “limited” public health recommendations — with a strict firewall between them, according to Roger Severino, former director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights under the Trump administration, told POLITICO.
“We have to move away from social engineering and more towards good outcomes,” said Roger Severino, the former Director of the HHS during the Trump tenure.
Some experts say that Donald Trump would need legislative support if he wanted to make any major changes to the CDC like splitting it in two or even downsizing it.
However, the CDC is entirely an executive branch agency. There’s a constituional legal argument to be made that Donald Trump could make these changes to the CDC by way of a simple executive order since he’s the head of the executive branch.
“If you can’t legislatively move to split the CDC, you certainly can modify the staffing over there in such a way that you have political appointees,” one legal expert noted in the Politico report.
A former Barack Obama official weighed in on this news and said that making any major changes to the CDC to help improve transparency and trust would make it more “difficult” for the federal government to respond to novel health concerns facing the nation.
“If you have different agencies, you’re not going to make it easier to deal with an outbreak. You’re going to make it harder to deal with an outbreak and you’re going to reduce the likelihood that Americans will be resilient and healthy enough to withstand it,” Mr. Tom Frieden said, who was the director of the CDC for President Barack Obama during his tenure.
Polls suggest that, overall, Americans do not believe the federal government is completely guiltless in how they handled the pandemic panic in 2020 and 2021. There’s good reason for that too.
At a recent House Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee hearing, a Republican Representative from North Dakota, Mr. Kelly Armstrong, noted that the CDC was specifically using data to try and track if Americans were going to church during the lockdowns.
How anyone thinks that the very same agency in charge of evaluating the data should also be in charge of making the final health recommendations is absolutely insane. It’s far too easy to manipulate data to get it to say what you want to say. Having the two operations be separate is a step towards a proper use of federal government data that isn’t going to be used against Americans.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
