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Our cryptospora crisis might be worse because of DOGE, CNN reports.

As head of the federal lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks throughout the nation, Dr. Joel Barratt watched with alarm as Trump administration cuts and hiring freezes last year slowly depleted his staff.

By the time his 11-person team was reduced to three in September, Barratt said he had enough and resigned. But before leaving, he said, he sent emails to higher-ups at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the risks of losing staff and how it could hurt the response to future outbreaks.

And now, those warnings have become reality, with the employees working to rein in a growing cyclospora outbreak in the Midwest, forced to do more with less.

The Bulwark's Andrew Egger adds:

Meanwhile, some Democrats have zeroed in on another, separate cyclosporiasis-surveillance program that was DOGE’d out last year. Last week, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking why he had terminated surveillance of the cyclospora parasite in the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. “Your foolish and self-indulgent demolition of critical public health programs,” Ossoff wrote, “puts Americans at risk.”

Some critics describe Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy as eugenicists, men who are using the government to try to rid the world of ethnic and racial groups they regard as lesser. I think that applies to Musk, who hates Black people, particularly African Blacks. He knew what his assault on USAID would do to health programs in sub-Saharan Africa and he got the outcome he wanted.

I'm not sure this applies to the Kennedy/MAHA crackpots. A New Yorker article from late May by Dr. Dhruv Khullar begins this way:

Last November, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health and an acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ... wrote a short piece with the N.I.H.’s principal deputy director for the conservative publication City Journal. The piece argues that the country should largely stop trying to surveil for new pathogens, assess the risk they pose to humans, or develop vaccines and drugs to manage them. These activities, the authors suggest, mostly serve to keep scientists happy and funded. Instead, the public should be encouraged to become “metabolically healthy” by, for example, “eating nutritious food” and “getting up and walking more.” Bhattacharya has railed against the politicization of science, but the piece concludes that the best way to prepare for deadly pandemics is by “making America healthy again.”

I don't imagine that Jay Bhattacharya and Robert Kennedy agree on an ethnic group or groups that constitute the master race. What I think they do agree on is the classic right-wing idea that if you're vulnerable, well, tough luck, because they aren't. You don't deserve public health programs.

Like many corporate bosses and cult leaders, they think you should do what they do -- they like it (Kennedy loves his supplements) and nothing terrible has happened to them. And when something bad does goes wrong -- Kennedy's youthful heroin addiction, for instance -- they have rich parents or other resources. Doesn't everybody?

Khullar writes that Bhattacharya believes

the public should be encouraged to become “metabolically healthy” by, for example, “eating nutritious food” and “getting up and walking more.”

He wrote this piece in May, when the deadly pathogen making headlines was hantavirus, not cryptospora. Khullar added:

Notably, the first known hantavirus death in the U.S., in 1993, was of a nineteen-year-old marathon runner. Metabolic health only gets you so far.

But men with power whose lives are going well think everyone should be as lucky as they are, and if you're not, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The government should be both laissez-faire and paternalistic: we won't help you, but we'll tell you what you ought to do, and if life doesn't work out for you, it must be because you aren't doing what we assume works for us.

What's really working for them is wealth, privilege, a recognition that saying what rich people want to hear about government assistance (that it's bad if it goes to the non-privileged) will position you well in life -- and luck. Condemning everyone who can't manage to get situated this way to whatever fate throws their way is a non-racial form of eugenics.