Apparently, CDC Director Susan Monarez, PhD., confirmed by the Senate only a month ago, has been fired. This is really bad – every competent leader at a critically important public health agency, the CDC, is being ousted or driven away at an institution already decimated by cuts, shot at, and subjected to incompetent appointees. The purging of capable scientists devoted to excellence just doesn’t stop.
• David French, writing in the Times, explains why this one sentence in Article II of the Constitution is now such a problem: “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” His proposed remedy:
“There is a constitutional answer to this national challenge. We can — at long last — heed the warnings of the antifederalists, and we can do it simply enough, by changing the first sentence of Article II. Instead of declaring, “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,” it should read, “A president of the United States of America shall execute laws passed by Congress.””
• Dr. Jessica Steier does an excellent job of illustrating why RFK Jr.’s choice of David Geier as the leader of an investigation into the cause of autism is a terrible one. Read The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism in the NY Times.
• From John Gruber’s Daring Fireball:
“TRUMP’S BLS PICK E.J. ANTONI IS — SHOCKER — A CRACKPOT HACK ★
Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday:
President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree.
Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump and MAGA have flipped what “conservative” means in US politics. Some legitimate economists are left-leaning, some are right-leaning. It’s a field of study, like the law, that attracts from across the political spectrum. But all legitimate economists believe in trying to objectively measure the economy. MAGA kooks have overrun Republican elected politics, but not so with economics. So of course legitimate conservative economists are objecting to Trump’s nomination of this guy Antoni, who both is a crackpot kook of the paranoid style and looks like one, with crazy eyes and, of all things, a devil beard.
To the commentary:
Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios’ Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.
Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he’s worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Hebert said. […]
Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS’ measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” she wrote. “I hope we see better at BLS.”
That’s the take on Antoni from conservative economists.”
• Carl Zimmer writes in the NY Times (“Scientists Are Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life“) about how scientists are working on simplifying the process of translation by reducing the number of redundant codons in a reconstructed E. coli genome. This was a major feat of genetic engineering – one that serves as a reminder of how much we still need to learn about how the mechanics and control of DNA an RNA encoding, transcription, and translation work.
Tom Friedman writes in his NYT essay The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away about how truth, justice, and the American way are disappearing. The termination of McEntarfer at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and cyberwarrior Jen Easterly at West Point are particularly galling (the latter after another loony Loomer post). Friedman quotes Easterly from her response on LinkedIn:
“As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies…Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point…To lead in this moment is to believe that with unshakeable certainty, to resist the cynicism that corrodes our institutions, to meet falsehoods with fidelity to truth and adversity with resilience.”
This government is losing the best among us.
Matt Yglesias, writing in his latest Substack post Trump’s insane war on renewable energy:
“All Trump will accomplish by throttling renewables is making costs higher and the air dirtier than if he just let Americans use technologies that really are quite cheap at the current margin. He’s letting culture war prejudice, special interest politics, and polarization get in the way of his stated goals of lower costs and energy dominance.”
• Kristen Panthagani M.D. PhD. runs through the sad timeline of the damage done to Science and Public Health by the current administration here in her You Can Know Things blog.
• RFK Jr apparently believes (against all evidence to the contrary) that pediatricians profit from vaccine administration. He either mentally resides in an alternate universe or is lying in an attempt to further line his pockets when he thankfully leaves his post at HHS, a post for which he is totally unfit.
Apparently, it’s hear no evil, see no evil, avoid all mention and then the problem of climate change disappears. Magic! WashPo reports that the State Department has fired the remaining employees who worked on climate change negotiations.
