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A second confirmed case of Elon Musk’s DOGE team accidentally firing critical government workers is leaving egg on the president’s face.
NBC’s report revealing that officials at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) working on the federal efforts to halt the spread of bird flu at poultry and dairy farms comes at a poor time for the administration. Egg prices are skyrocketing as the culling of millions of chickens — implemented by the USDA to halt the disease in farms where it is discovered — has caused shortages.
The agency expects prices to jump another 20 percent this year.
But a spokesperson for the USDA on Tuesday was forced to admit to reporters that Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative has already hindered the agency’s efforts. “Several” employees critical to the agency’s bird flu response efforts were laid off by order of DOGE staffers, according to the USDA, only for the layoffs to be rescinded after the necessity of the axed positions was explained to Musk’s team.
“Although several positions supporting [bird flu efforts] were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” a USDA spokesperson told NBC.
The agency would go on to say that it was actually looking to expand the teams assigned to food safety: “We are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfill our statutory mission.”
By the spokesperson’s own admission, the firings of bird flu experts at the USDA were taking place at almost the exact moment one of Donald Trump’s advisers was on television boasting about how the agency would be implementing new policies to fight the outbreak.
Politico separately reported that at least some of the firings impacted a fourth of the employees at the National Animal Health Laboratory Network — described as already short on staff — which coordinates disease testing between laboratories around the country. Some labs had already been informed that testing for positive cases of bird flu would be delayed by the time the firings were reversed.
“The Biden plan was to just, you know, kill chickens, and they spent billions of dollars just randomly killing chickens within a perimeter where they found a sick chicken,” Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said derisively this Sunday on CBS News.
He’d go on to claim that the USDA was “finalizing the ideas” about implementing better biosecurity measures at poultry farms “with the best scientists in government.”
The Biden administration did primarily pursue mass cullings of birds at farms where the virus was detected, starting in February 2022 with the first recorded instance at a U.S. facility since 2020. But the USDA pursued the exact same policy under Trump’s first term; though the virus detected at a Tennessee poultry plant in 2017 was a different strain than the H5N1 virus currently behind the brunt of the U.S. outbreak. At one farm during Trump’s first six months in office that year more than 70,000 chickens were culled.
Hassett’s ill-timed slam of the Biden administration’s policies comes as his boss approaches the end of his first month in office. The president’s party in Congress is still struggling to unify behind a budget bill, with cuts to Medicaid potentially on the table along with reductions to other areas of the social safety net, including food stamps.
The House GOP is hoping to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget — all while boosting funding for U.S. defense and border security, and extending the 2017 Republican tax cuts.
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The latest round of mistaken firings at the DOGE team’s apparent direction even miffed some Republican lawmakers in Congress. To several news outlets, GOP House members have vented frustrations privately and in a few cases, publicly, about the speed and recklessness of the personnel reductions Musk’s team is directing.
“Before making cuts rashly, the Administration should be studying and staffing to see what the consequences are. Measure twice before cutting. They have had to backtrack multiple times,” said Don Bacon of Nebraska, a member of the Agriculture committee.
And while Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told a local radio station that Congress “can’t do anything but complain” about personnel changes, lawmakers could indeed cause problems for the administration if the DOGE team targets funding approved by the legislative branch.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has spoken about securing a guarantee that the DOGE team will not go after any such funding in exchange for Democratic votes to pass a funding measure to get the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year, though it’s unclear if Mike Johnson will take that deal — or even need to.
Meanwhile, new USDA director Brooke Rollins (who claimed last week that the DOGE-directed changes at her agency “will make us faster” and “more efficient”) told Fox & Friends that the Trump team was looking for lessons from other countries to control bird flu outbreaks.
“We are looking at every possible scenario to ensure that we are doing everything we can in a safe, secure manner but also to ensure that Americans have the food that they need,” said Rollins.
