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As the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger had a triple target on his back from the start of Donald Trump’s presidency: He was a Joe Biden appointee, he was the head of one of the independent regulatory agencies that the Trump administration is targeting, and his duty was to fight to protect the jobs of tens of thousands of civil servants the president has tried to fire.

So when Dellinger received an email on Friday, February 7, telling him that he’d been dismissed, he wasn’t surprised. He also wasn’t going to quietly concede. Under a law that’s stood for decades, the special counsel serves a five-year term and “may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The following Monday morning, Dellinger filed a suit challenging his firing, and by that night, a federal judge had temporarily reinstated him.

During the following month, Dellinger led a bifurcated life that he joked was “like a Severance episode, except I was always at work”: one workplace “where I was advocating for others, and that was the place I wanted to be completely focused,” he told me on Friday. “But then the other side of it was trying to keep my job.”

OSC is a classic post-Watergate creation, designed to insulate the functioning of the federal government from political and other improper interference. It’s charged with protecting whistleblowers inside the executive branch and with identifying violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits politicking by government officials. If OSC believes that federal employees have been improperly fired, it can file a case with the Merit Systems Protection Board.

This makes an otherwise obscure office very important right now, because the Trump administration, with Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service leading the charge, has laid off huge swaths of the federal workforce in apparent defiance of laws designed to protect them, with more cuts promised. Last Wednesday, Dellinger won a major victory: The MSPB ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture must temporarily rehire nearly 6,000 probationary employees while an investigation proceeds into whether they were wrongfully fired. He told me that he was ready to try to get tens of thousands more probationary employees reinstated.

Instead, Dellinger found himself out of a job a few hours later. On Wednesday night, a panel of judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for the administration and against Dellinger, declaring that he would be removed while he pursued his appeal. The next day, Dellinger announced that he was ending his fight.

“I knew it would take at least a year to get a final decision” in court, he told me. “It may well have gone against me, and by that point, seeing the damage that’s taking place on a daily basis at federal agencies, I knew there would be almost nothing I could do should I ever get back into my job.”

In his statement ending his challenge, he wrote: “I strongly disagree with the circuit court’s decision, but I accept and will abide by it. That’s what Americans do.” That was a pointed response to comments by several government officials, including Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, who have questioned whether the executive branch has to follow judicial rulings. “I think the key to our country is respect for the rule of law, and I think there’s been too much disrespect of late,” he told me. “So I wanted to make it clear that just because I’m unhappy with the decision, I in no way contest its binding nature.”

What is at stake right now is not just the fate of whistleblowers and probationary employees but also the underlying principle of independent agencies within the executive branch. Such bodies have existed since the 1930s and are written into laws passed by Congress, but as I wrote recently, Trump allies have argued in Project 2025 and elsewhere that independent regulatory agencies are unconstitutional because they limit the president’s control of the executive branch. They have promised to politicize traditionally detached parts of the government.

If courts conclude that this independence is unconstitutional, then most existing protections for whistleblowing seem doomed. Congress concluded when passing these laws that the executive branch needed internal watchdogs. They are generally presidentially appointed—like Dellinger, and like inspectors general inside major departments—but, once in place, insulated from pressure. Without them, whistleblowers have no clear recourse besides going to Congress (no easy feat for all but the most major scandals) or the press. Either path is uncertain and fraught with dangers of retaliation.

Gutting the current regime may result in more of the problems that Musk is supposedly fighting, Dellinger argued. “I think it’ll mean that government is less effective,” he told me, because fewer routes will exist for employees to shed light on failures. “I think it may lead to an increase in waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think we’re not going to know for sure what it means, because you don’t have these independent watchdogs who are able to make their work public.”

The entire existing vision of the executive branch, constructed by an idealistic liberal vision of government held accountable by legal structures and processes, seems currently under threat. Dellinger is a fitting figure to be in the middle of this fight. He’s spent his career moving between government service and practicing law in the private sector. (He’s also contributed to The Atlantic.) His father, Walter Dellinger, served as the acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and was regarded as one of the most brilliant Democratic lawyers of his generation. Hampton Dellinger told me he remains hopeful that the decades-old vision of the federal government is not dying.

“The fact that people are resisting unlawful orders, I think, is vital,” he said. “I still have faith in the judiciary, even if my case didn’t succeed. I have faith in generations younger than me.” If the federal government is to run on anything other than patrimonialism, those generations will have to find a way to rebuild it after the current assault.

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The U.S. stock market plunged today amid concerns over the economic pain that President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies could bring.

ICE agents arrested the Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil over the weekend. According to Khalil’s lawyer, agents said that they were operating under State Department orders to revoke his green card. The State Department declined to comment on Khalil’s case.

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Turtleboy Will Not Be Stopped

By Chris Heath

On overpasses and by roadsides they gather, holding banners and placards. In the early days, only a few people showed up, congregating at chosen times and scattered locations around Boston. But their cause has grown and their numbers have swelled. For Labor Day 2024, plans were made for “standouts,” as the organizers called them, in more than 70 places—all over Massachusetts, yes, but also in Ohio, Kansas, Florida, California, and elsewhere.

These assemblies are the most visible manifestation of what is usually referred to as the Free Karen Read movement. If in the fullness of time it will seem strange that such unity and passion should have been mustered in defense of a 45-year-old Massachusetts financial analyst and adjunct college professor accused of killing her police-officer boyfriend by backing into him with her car … well, not to these people gathered today.

Read the full article.

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Read. Waste Wars, by the journalist Alexander Clapp, tracks how the garbage of rich countries ends up in some of the world’s poorest places.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This weekend, I drove to the North Carolina mountains with my family, and we spent most of the drive both ways listening to Big Ugly, the brand-new record by Fust, one of my favorite musical discoveries of the past year. The Durham-based alt-country band is led by Aaron Dowdy, who is a Ph.D. student in Duke University’s literature department but also firmly rooted in his native Appalachian Virginia. The lead track, “Spangled,” rhymes Route 11 with repossession and includes the memorable image of “feeling like a sparkler / that’s been thrown off a roof.” I’m obsessed.

— David

Isabel Fattal and Shan Wang contributed to this newsletter.

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In October 2020, Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email that maligned a colleague. A few days before, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, had, with two others, put out a statement—the Great Barrington Declaration—calling for looser public-health restrictions in the face of the pandemic. In place of lockdowns, the statement contended, the nation could simply let infections spread among most of the population while the old and infirm remained in relative isolation. Collins, like many other scientists, thought this was a dangerous idea. Bhattacharya and his co-authors were “fringe epidemiologists” whose proposal needed a “quick and devastating” rebuttal, Collins wrote in an email that later came to light through a public-records request. Collins doubled down on this dismissal in a media interview a week later: “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he told The Washington Post. “This is not mainstream sncience.”

So where are these two now? Collins abruptly ended his 32-year career at NIH last week, while Bhattacharya is Donald Trump’s pick to take over the agency. The turnabout has created a pleasing narrative for those aggrieved at scientific governance. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you because of what you believed,” Jim Banks, a Republican senator from Indiana, said at Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing yesterday. For Bhattacharya, a man who has described himself as the victim of “a propaganda attack” perpetrated by the nation’s $48 billion biomedical-research establishment, Collins’s insult has become a badge of pride, even a leading qualification for employment in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The “fringe” is now in charge.

Last year, when Collins was asked by a House committee about his comments on the Great Barrington Declaration, he said he was alarmed that the proposal had so quickly made its way to his boss, Alex Azar, who was then the secretary of Health and Human Services. Now that role is filled by another figure from the fringe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and presumably, outsider scholars such as Bhattacharya—a health economist and a nonpracticing physician with a predilection for contrary views—will have greater sway than ever. (Bhattacharya declined to be interviewed for this story. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Science, to succeed, needs free speech,” Bhattacharya told the committee during the hearing. “It needs an environment where there’s tolerance to dissent.” This has long been his message—and warning—to the scientific community. In Bhattacharya’s view, Collins helped coordinate an effort to discredit his and others’ calls for an alternative approach to the pandemic; Collins’s role at an institution that disperses billions of dollars in research funding gave him a frightening power to “cast out heretics,” as Bhattacharya put it in 2023, “just like the medieval Catholic Church did.”

Now he means to use the same authority to rectify that wrong. In his opening remarks yesterday, Bhattacharya vowed to “create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.” What this means in practice isn’t yet clear, but The Wall Street Journal has reported that he might try to prioritize funding for universities that score high on to-be-determined measures of campus-wide “academic freedom.” In other words, Bhattacharya may attempt to use the agency’s billion-dollar leverage in reverse, to bully academics into being tolerant.

These aspirations match up with those of his allies who are riding into Washington as champions of the underheard in science. Last month, Kennedy promised in his first speech to his staff that he would foster debate and “convene representatives of all viewpoints” to study chronic disease. “Nothing is going to be off-limits,” he said. Marty Makary, the nominee for FDA commissioner, has talked about his experience of the “censorship complex” and bemoaned an atmosphere of “total intolerance” in public health. Consensus thinking is oppressive, these men suggest. Alternative ideas, whatever those might be, have intrinsic value.

[Read: Revenge of the COVID contrarians]

Surely we can all agree that groupthink is a drag. But a curious pattern is emerging among the fringe-ocrats who are coming into power. Their dissenting views, strewn across the outskirts of conventional belief, appear to be curling toward a new and fringe consensus of its own. On the subject of vaccines, for instance, there used to be some space between the positions of Kennedy, the nation’s leading figure casting doubt on the safety and benefits of inoculations, and Bhattacharya. Kennedy has made false claims about the dangers of the mRNA-based COVID shots. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, once called the same vaccines “a medical miracle—extremely valuable for protecting the vulnerable against severe COVID-19 disease.” (He even criticized Anthony Fauci for downplaying the benefits of COVID shots by continuing to wear a mask after being immunized.)

Bhattacharya has in the past been tolerant of others’ more outrageous claims about vaccines. But that neutrality has lately drifted into a gentle posture of acceptance, like a one-armed hug. Under questioning from senators, he said that he is convinced that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccine (and that he fully supports vaccinating children against measles). But he also floated the idea that Kennedy’s goal of doing further research on the topic would be worthwhile just the same. Last July, despite his past enthusiasm for mRNA-based COVID-19 shots, Bhattacharya said that he was planning to sign on to a statement calling for their deauthorization, because they are “contributing to an alarming rise in disability and excess deaths.” Kennedy has petitioned for the same, on the same grounds. (There is, in fact, no meaningful evidence that the vaccines have caused a spate of excess deaths.) In a post on X, Bhattacharya explained that he’d been hesitant to take this step at first, because some groups might still benefit from the vaccines, but then he came to realize that pulling the vaccine will create the conditions necessary for testing whether it still has any value.

[Read: The inflated risk of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest]

On this and other issues, the dissenting voices have started to combine into a chorus. The lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin provides another case in point. In yesterday’s hearing, Bhattacharya described scientific experts’ early dismissal of the possibility that the coronavirus spread from a lab in Wuhan, China, as “a low point in the history of science.” That’s an overstatement, but the criticism is fair: Dissenting views were stifled and ignored. But here again, what started as mere endorsement of debate has evolved into a countervailing sense of certainty. Although there’s still plenty of reason to believe that the pandemic did, in fact, begin with the natural passage of the virus from an animal host, the most important details about the pandemic’s origin remain unknown. Yet the fringe is nearly settled on the alternative interpretation. Bhattacharya has said that the pandemic “likely” started in a lab (a position that has been endorsed, albeit with low or moderate confidence, by almost half of the government agencies that have looked into it). Makary called the theory “a no-brainer.” And RFK Jr. published a 600-page book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, in support of it.

Based on the Senate’s Republican majority and the precedent of Kennedy’s confirmation, Bhattacharya is almost certain to sail through his Senate vote, and in short order. His prospects of delivering on his mission, though, are hazier. Some of his positions are already being undermined by the Trump administration’s prior actions. According to a new report in Nature, the agency is terminating hundreds of active research grants that may be construed to have a focus on gender or diversity, among other topics. Some work may be permitted to continue as long as any “DEI language” has been stripped from associated documents. This is hardly the “culture of respect for free speech” that Bhattacharya promised yesterday. Other, basic workings of the NIH have been dismantled under the second Trump administration: Approximately 1,200 employees have been fired, grant reviews have been frozen, and policies have been declared that would squeeze research funding for the nation’s universities. Bhattacharya is about to take the levers of power, but those levers have been ripped from their housing, and the springs removed and sold as scrap.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

When pressed on these developments yesterday, Bhattacharya kept returning to a single line: “I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH, and the scientists that the NIH supports, have the resources they need.” Whether he’d have the authority or know-how to do so remains in doubt. “Dr. Bhattacharya doesn’t really understand how NIH works, and he doesn’t understand how decisions are made,” Harold Varmus, who ran the agency in the 1990s, told me shortly after the hearing ended. As for Bhattacharya’s goals of promoting free speech among scientists and nurturing cutting-edge ideas for research, Varmus said that the problem has been misdiagnosed: Whatever conservatism exists doesn’t really come from the top, he said, but from the grant-review committees and the scientists themselves. “It’s exasperating for me to see what is about to happen,” he told me, “because this guy should not be in my old office.”

For what it’s worth, Bhattacharya has also shared other ambitious plans. He aims, for instance, to make science more reliable by incorporating into NIH-funded research the dreary work of replicating findings. “Replication is the heart and soul of what truth is in science,” he said during the hearing. That might help solve a pressing problem in the sciences, but it would also be a very costly project, started at a time when research costs are being cut. Under current conditions, even just the basic job of running the NIH seems pretty stressful on its own. Bhattacharya has, by his account, experienced lots of stress in recent years due to the many efforts to discredit him. His confirmation may not bring him full relief.

Imagine telling someone five years ago that a carton of eggs would cost more than a pound of salmon fillet or a whole rotisserie chicken. Somehow, today, it does. Prices have doubled in the past year, with a dozen eggs going for as much as $15 in certain urban markets. Restaurants and bodegas are tacking surcharges onto breakfast dishes. Cold cases in big-box stores are empty; grocers are limiting customers to a dozen or two a visit to make stocks last. Google searches for the phrase backyard chickens have tripled in the past two months.

Consumers are furious. Eggs are the second-most commonly consumed grocery item, beating out milk and cereal. The average American eats an egg every 1.3 days, or 277 a year. Eggs provide 4 percent of protein consumed in the country and are one of the least-expensive high-quality sources of the muscle-building macronutrient.

Or at least they were, until a highly pathogenic form of bird flu spread to American flocks in 2022. Today, the Department of Agriculture is tracking 36 separate outbreaks across nine states. The disease has led to the death or culling of 27 million laying hens—nearly 10 percent of the nation’s commercial flock—in the past eight weeks alone.

[Lora Kelley: The breaking point of eggs]

As a result, the egg supply is severely constrained. Businesses are struggling. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to bring down the cost of consumer goods “starting on day one,” while standing in front of a display of Cheerios, bacon, flour, and, yes, eggs. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts “little chance” for improved supplies “in the near term.” Americans paying more for their omelets and bacon-egg-and-cheeses are incensed.

It might not make cash-strapped consumers feel any better, but the fact that eggs were ever ubiquitous and cheap is remarkable. Americans’ egg addiction has been made possible only through billions of dollars of technological and infrastructural investment, as well as the immiseration of billions of animals. The industrial advances that made eggs cheap in the 20th century are, in part, responsible for their excruciating cost today.  

Contemporary laying hens are likely descended from dinosaurs. (When you eat a dino-shaped chicken nugget, you eat the present injection-molded into the shape of the past, the child in the shape of the grandparent.) Humans began domesticating the birds thousands of years ago, and Christopher Columbus brought them to this continent in 1493.

The 90 billion eggs that American laying hens now produce each year are a wonder. They are nutritional powerhouses: a complete protein, with all nine essential amino acids, abounding in vitamins B2, B12, A, D, E, and K; choline; selenium; phosphorus; and zinc. They are tasty; saturated-fat and cholesterol give them a tender and unctuous mouthfeel. Plus, they are a handy ingredient, binding compounds together and providing structure and moisture to baked goods.

Contrary to their reputation, eggs are strong too. Their shells are composed of calcium carbonate, known as “nature’s ceramic,” their pointed ovoid shape stellar at dispersing force; in architectural terms, they are palm-size marble cathedrals. In one demonstration at Harvard, a carefully cushioned single egg resisted the weight of 10 lead bricks, or 250 pounds. Try crushing a raw egg by wrapping your hand around it and squeezing: It’s tough if the egg is horizontal to your fingers, and impossible if it is vertical.

Although the egg is resistant to slow, evenly distributed pressure, it is vulnerable to sharp, concussive pressure. It has to be. Neonatal chicks weighing a tenth of a pound peck their way out. Just 5.5 pounds of force will crack an eggshell. A polite handshake applies more pressure, a bite on a bacon-egg-and-cheese perhaps 20 times as much.

This quality makes eggs difficult to transport from farm to market, more like grapes than like milk or rice. Perishability poses another challenge. At room temperature, farm-fresh eggs are safe to eat for weeks. But the government requires eggs to be washed; once washed, they begin to develop dangerous concentrations of bacteria in a few hours. Whole eggs cannot be frozen; the water content in the egg expands, cracking open the shell. Separated whites freeze and dethaw fine, but separated yolks do not. Ice crystallization changes their lipid and protein structure, transforming their mucosal texture into something akin to nut butter or chewed gum. Gelatinization makes it impossible to beat the yolks into dough or whisk them into dressing, unless the frozen egg yolks are preprocessed.

For centuries, none of this was a problem, because nobody was trying to transport these fragile, messy, spoilable ovals long distances. Many American families never bought eggs. Chickens were ubiquitous on farms and homesteads—easy to raise, quick to reproduce, and free to fatten, given that the omnivorous birds are adept foragers and happy consumers of table scraps. Ranchers and growers would sell their “farmwives’ surplus” from April to July, when laying peaked.

Around the turn of the 20th century, as the supply chain started to transform, so did the chicken and the egg. Selective breeding cleaved the broiler bird from the laying hen, the former specialized to grow fat thighs and breasts, the latter specialized to pump out eggs. Chicken farming became an industry of its own, and egg farming another.

Specialized farmers moved their flocks indoors, reducing mortality rates. They figured out that lighting their barns spurred the birds into laying more eggs, and into laying them year-round. One farmer who rigged up a 50-watt bulb noted that his hens were “cackling and behaving in liveliest fashion,” laying eggs at all hours, as recounted in Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History. Farmers started to lift hens off the floor on wire-mesh systems, making barns easier to muck out and tamping down infection.

[Read: Get used to expensive eggs]

A spate of agricultural innovations helped move the newfound bounty to market. Multiple inventors came up with the egg carton early in the 20th century, meaning farmers no longer had to use baskets and crates. Conveyor belts, incubators, sandblasters for cleaning, and egg-grading machines for measuring helped commoditize the product. The nascent industry piggybacked on innovations in the meatpacking industry. Companies transporting sides of beef in refrigerated trucks and warehouses began accepting eggs too.  

Even so, customers preferred fresh, local eggs to faraway, cold-stored ones well into the 20th century. Eggs were not routinely “candled” to check for spoilage, meaning a home cook never knew what cracking one open would bring, Freidberg writes. For a while, dehydrated powdered eggs became popular. The American military bought millions of pounds to feed soldiers during World War II. Bakeries started using frozen whites and processed frozen yolks. Analysts figured that consumers would opt for these stable products too. “The shell egg is fading in importance,” a member of the American Warehousemen’s Association concluded in 1941. It did not fade in importance. Advances in chicken-rearing, sanitation, shipping, and packaging, as well as advertising, brought consumers around. By the 1960s, many Americans were eating commodity eggs, rather than ones produced by local farmers or hens in backyard hutches.

Industrialization made eggs cheap. But it came with a cost, particularly for the animals that produced them.

Male chicks have no role in egg production, so they are gassed, threshed, or crushed after hatching. Female chicks have their beaks trimmed without anesthetic. Once grown, most are placed in battery cages, each bird allotted 67 to 86 square inches of space, smaller than a piece of printer paper. In these crowded conditions, laying hens cannot preen, move around, or spread their wings. The wire in the cages is slanted to let the eggs roll out, making it hard for the chickens to settle. Although 11 states have banned battery cages, three in five American commercial hens continue to reside in them.

Many birds on industrial farms show obvious signs of distress, afflicted by injury, osteoporosis, liver disease, and prolapse, as well as depression and social derangement. When their egg production drops, generally when the birds are a year or two old, they are gassed and turned into poultry meal, a main component of dog food.

The egg-production system imposes its own costs on consumers. In the 1970s, the country had thousands of small-scale egg farms, vying to win over customers with competitive prices and fresh quality. Today, 150 firms produce 95 percent of the country’s eggs, and a single one, Cal-Maine Foods, accounts for 20 percent of the market. The industry has consolidated vertically as well as horizontally. Two companies supply 90 percent of chicks. A single firm sets benchmark egg prices, hampering price discovery in the market. Consumer advocates and the courts have found evidence of price-fixing, price gouging, and “antitrust conspiracy”—made invisible on grocery-store shelves thanks to creative packaging and brand differentiation.

Of late, the centralization and industrialization of the industry have intensified the bird-flu crisis. The largest commercial egg producers own millions of birds. A single laying house holds as many as 350,000, serried into wire crates and stacked on top of one another. The virus spreads rapidly in such environments. USDA rules obligate farms to cull an entire flock if a single bird is infected; the government then compensates the farm for its losses. The culling policy helps stop the spread of the lethal virus, but the compensation policy reduces farms’ incentive to invest in smaller-scale, more humane, and safer animal-rearing practices that would limit the need for workers to kill so many birds in the first place.  

Some egg producers have managed to eke out higher earnings despite the spread of bird flu, perhaps thanks to cartelization. From 2022 to 2023, retail egg prices tripled, noted Angela Huffman of Farm Action, a nonprofit advocating for small farms. She pointed to data indicating that prices would have gone up only 12 to 24 percent in a competitive market.

The price of a dozen eggs has been a potent political issue for the past half century or so. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon tussled over eggs in the 1960 presidential contest; a decade later, Nixon took up the issue again as inflation spiked. “Eggs have to be transported, processed, cooked, and served, but 30 cents a dozen to the farmer and $30 a dozen to whoever buys those eggs in a restaurant, that is just too much,” he told reporters in 1972, stressing that he would tackle the middleman for the common man.

During his 1996 campaign for the Republican nomination, a reporter asked Lamar Alexander how much a dozen eggs cost. He did not respond, and was later caught asking an aide to get him the number: “I need to know right now.” The Bob Dole campaign was thrilled. “Lamar may be an outsider when it comes to grocery stores, but he’s an insider when it comes to politics,” it crowed in a press release. “Next time he’s walking across New Hampshire, he might want to stop at a supermarket.”

On the trail last year, Trump lambasted Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for failing to bring food prices down. In office, his administration has blamed egg prices directly on their policies. Biden “directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply,” Trump’s press secretary told reporters last month.  

[Read: The chickens that are surrogates for rare breeds]

This week, the Trump administration laid out a five-point plan to get egg prices down: financing on-farm biosecurity upgrades, providing additional funds to farmers who have to cull their flocks, investing in bird-flu vaccines and therapeutics, eliminating regulations, and increasing foreign imports. Administration officials have critiqued the USDA culling policy, suggesting that vaccination and biosecurity measures should render it unnecessary. “Why does it make any sense to have a big perimeter of dead chickens, when it’s the ducks and the geese that are spreading it?” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said on Face the Nation earlier this month.

But pharmaceutical firms have not invested much in bird-flu vaccines. There are no USDA-approved options, and there is no farm-by-farm vaccine infrastructure. “As ugly as it is, just like with the wildfires in California, sometimes you have to cut all the trees down and dig a fire line,” explained Matt Koci of North Carolina State University. “We can’t do anything to save that poultry house, but maybe we can dig enough of a line around it to save neighboring farms.”

Of the proposed policy measures, increasing imports would likely be the most effective. But Trump is waging a global trade war at the moment, and as the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated, companies need time and money to adjust their supply chains. “The system for egg production is both complex and time sensitive,” Emily Metz, the president of the American Egg Board, wrote in a statement. “It’s going to take a sustained period” for supply to catch up with demand.

Consumers aren’t happy, but the chickens are the ones really suffering. At least for protein-loving breakfast eaters, there are always beans.

Al Jazeera’s @khalidmajzoubofficial examines claims made by and about the US Department of Government Efficiency

Gilead (GILD) said on Tuesday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted its application for a twice-yearly injectable drug designed to prevent HIV. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted a conditional license for a vaccine designed to protect chickens from the bird flu, in an effort to…

Read more...

In a bid to contain a bird flu outbreak that has sent egg prices soaring, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) last week granted a conditional license for a vaccine designed to protect chickens from the virus.

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America’s health secretaries, almost as a rule, have résumés manicured to a point of frictionlessness. Once in a while one will attract scandal in their tenure; see Tom Price’s reported fondness for chartered jets. But anyone who has garnered enough cachet to be nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services tends to arrive in front of the Senate with such impeccable credentials that finding anything that might disqualify them from the position is difficult.

Donald Trump’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed today as America’s newest health secretary, was specifically intended to break that mold. Kennedy positioned himself as a truth teller determined to uproot the “corporate capture” and “tyrannical insensate bureaucracies” that had taken hold of the nation’s public-health agencies. Even so, it’s remarkable just how unimaginable his confirmation would have been in any political moment other than today’s, when an online reactionary has been given a high-level position in the Justice Department and a teenager known as “Big Balls” is advising the State Department. Kennedy holds broadly appealing views on combatting corruption and helping Americans overcome chronic disease. But he is also, to an almost cartoonish degree, not impeccably credentialed. He has trafficked in innumerable unproven and dangerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, AIDS, anthrax, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, COVID-19, sunlight, gender dysphoria, and 5G. He has potential financial conflicts of interest. He has spoken about a worm eating part of his brain and about dumping a dead bear in Central Park. He has been accused of sexual assault. (In his confirmation hearing, Kennedy denied the allegation and said it was “debunked.”)

In the end, none of it mattered. While Senate Democrats unanimously opposed Kennedy’s confirmation, he sailed through the Senate’s vote this morning after losing just one Republican vote, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor who appears to have taken issue with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. Kennedy did, however, earn the support of Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who until last week seemed to be the Republican lawmaker most concerned about the potential damage of elevating an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist to the nation’s highest perch in public health. Kennedy’s confirmation is a victory for Trump, and a clear message that Senate Republicans are willing to embrace pseudoscience in their unwavering deference to him. Americans’ health is in Kennedy’s hands.

So what happens next? Spokespeople for Kennedy did not respond to my request to talk with him about his agenda. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s first weeks in office will likely be hectic ones, adding to the chaos of Trump’s nonstop executive orders and Elon Musk’s crackdowns on numerous federal agencies. As HHS head, Kennedy will oversee 13 different agencies, including the CDC, FDA, and National Institutes of Health. Prior to being appointed, Kennedy said he believed that 600 employees would need to be fired at the NIH and replaced with employees more aligned with Trump’s views. (The NIH employs roughly 20,000 people, so such a cut at least would be minor compared with the Department of Government Efficiency’s more sweeping moves.) He has also implied that everyone at the FDA’s food center could be handed pink slips. More generally, he has said he will “remove the financial conflicts of interest in our agencies,” but he hasn’t spelled out exactly who he believes is so conflicted that they should be out of a job.

At NIH in particular, any sudden moves by Kennedy would compound changes already unfolding under the auspices of DOGE. Musk’s crew has attempted to dramatically cut the amount of administrative funding typically doled out by the agency to universities in support of scientific research. Planned meetings about those funds were also abruptly canceled last month. (The funding cuts have been temporarily halted by a federal judge, and funding meetings appear to have resumed.) It’s easy to assume that Kennedy would support these efforts, given his aspirations to fire federal bureaucrats. But the DOGE effort may in fact undermine his larger goals, setting up some potential tension between Kennedy and Musk. Research funding is essential to Kennedy’s pursuit of unraveling the causes of America’s chronic-disease crisis; he has suggested devoting more of the NIH’s resources to investigating “preventive, alternative, and holistic approaches to health.”

On the policy front, in both the immediate and long term, chronic diseases will likely occupy Kennedy’s attention the most. He has called that issue an existential threat to the United States, and it is the clearest part of Kennedy’s agenda that has bipartisan support. However, exactly what he can do on this issue is uncertain. Many of the policies he’s advocated for, such as removing junk food from school lunches, actually fall to a different agency: the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The only food-related policy he’s regularly touted that he has the power to enact is banning certain chemical additives in the food supply. Even so, banning a food additive is typically a laboriously slow legal process.

His public statements provide other, vaguer hints about issues that he will likely contend with during his term. On abortion, he has said that he will direct the FDA and NIH to closely scrutinize the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone. (Trump has previously suggested that his administration would protect access to abortion pills, though the president’s position is murky at best.) On the price of drugs, Kennedy has said that he wants to crack down on the middlemen who negotiate them for insurance companies. But by and large Kennedy has said little about how he will tackle the complex regulatory issues that are traditionally the focus of the health secretary. He might simply not have that much to say. Kennedy has implied that he cares far less about those topics than about diet and chronic disease. During his confirmation hearing, he told senators that focusing on issues such as insurance payments without lowering the rate of chronic illness would be akin to “moving deck chairs around on the Titanic."

The biggest and most consequential question mark is how Kennedy will approach vaccines. If he were to chip away at Americans’ access to shots, or even simply at Americans’ readiness to receive them, he could degrade the nation’s protections against an array of diseases and, ultimately, be the cause of people’s deaths. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy was the subject of some of the most intense scrutiny during his confirmation hearings. “If you come out unequivocally, ‘Vaccines are safe; it does not cause autism,’ that would have an incredible impact. That’s your power. So what’s it going to be?” Cassidy asked. Kennedy pledged that he would not deprioritize or delay approval of new vaccines, and not muck up the government’s vaccine-approval standards. Throughout the process, he attempted to distance himself from his past vaccine positions, which include an assertion that the federal officials supporting the U.S. childhood-vaccine program were akin to leaders in the Catholic Church covering up pedophilia among priests. But his answers to senators’ questions about his past remarks and whether vaccines cause autism were consistently evasive. And some of his plans play into the anti-vaccine camp’s hands. He has promised, for example, to push for government-funded studies to be released with their full raw data—a move that likely would please transparency advocates, though also would act as an olive branch to anti-vaccine activists who have had to sue federal agencies in recent years for certain vaccine data.

Last week, after Cassidy cast a decisive committee vote that allowed Kennedy’s nomination to advance to full Senate consideration, he said in a speech on the Senate floor that he had pressure-tested Kennedy enough to feel confident that he could rebuild trust in public health. (Cassidy did not mention that advancing Kennedy was also in his political interest. A spokesperson for Cassidy declined my requests for an interview.) Kennedy holds an almost biblical status among his supporters, and a significant portion of those people distrust federal health agencies. Cassidy’s professed belief in Kennedy’s leadership offers a soothing vision: Imagine Americans whose views on the public-health establishment have been deeply eroded over time, all with their faith restored in one of the world’s most rigorous scientific institutions thanks to a radical outsider.

But consider the logic here. By voting to confirm Kennedy, the U.S. Senate is wagering the future of our public-health system on a prayer that a conspiracy theorist can build back up the agencies that he and his supporters have spent years breaking down. A more realistic outcome may be that Kennedy leaves public health more broken than ever before. Although many Americans are skeptical of the government’s scientific institutions, polls show that relatively few have the sort of deep-seated contempt for public-health agencies that Kennedy has espoused. By pandering to that fraction of voters, Kennedy risks alienating the much larger portion of Americans who might not agree with everything the CDC has done in recent years, but also don’t think that the agency’s vaccine program is comparable to a Nazi death camp, as Kennedy has claimed.

If Kennedy did go so far as to disavow any connection between autism and vaccines, that itself might lead to trouble. Jennifer Reich, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver who has studied vaccine skepticism, told me that the autism issue is just one part of a larger, much more diffuse set of concerns shared by parents who question vaccinating their children. For RFK to disavow all of his vaccine antagonism, he would essentially have to abandon his prima facie skepticism toward science more generally. Such an apology would likely do more to turn some of his most ardent supporters against him than change their views, argues Alison Buttenheim, an expert on vaccine skepticism at the University of Pennsylvania. “People will do amazing leaps and cartwheels to not have their beliefs and their behaviors in conflict,” she told me.

If Kennedy genuinely wants to restore faith in public health, he’ll have to win over his fellow conspiracists while maintaining the trust of the many people who already thought the agencies were doing a fine job before he arrived. Perhaps he’ll try. But proclaiming, as he did in October, that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end” is not a great way to start.

Nestle CEO Laurent Freixe made the case for packaged foods just hours before Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known critic of processed food, was confirmed as the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services.

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President Donald Trump might have campaigned on lowering the prices of groceries, but even as egg prices have become a minor national crisis, he has stayed quiet about the driving cause of America’s egg shortage: bird flu. Trump hasn’t outlined a plan for containing the virus, nor has he spoken about bird flu publicly since the CDC announced last April that the virus had infected a dairy worker. Last week, the CDC, which has ceased most communication with the public since Trump took office, posted data online that suggested humans may be able to spread the virus to cats. The agency quickly deleted the information.

Bird flu has now spread to cow herds across the country, led to the euthanization of tens of millions of domesticated poultry, sickened dozens of people in the United States, and killed one. The virus is not known to spread between humans, which has prevented the outbreak from exploding into the next pandemic. But the silence raises the question: How prepared is Trump’s administration if a widespread bird-flu outbreak does unfold? The administration reportedly plans to name Gerald Parker as the head of the White House’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress and is charged with organizing the responses of the various agencies that deal with infectious diseases. (I reached out to both Parker and the White House; neither replied.)

If the president names him to the post, the appointment might be the least controversial of any of Trump’s health-related picks: Parker is an expert on the interplay between human and animal health who served in the federal government for roughly a decade. But confronting bird flu—or any other pandemic threat—in this administration would require coordinating among a group of people uninterested in using most tools that can limit the spread of infectious disease.

Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, David Weldon, has questioned the safety of vaccines, and Jay Bhattacharya, the administration’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, vehemently opposed COVID shutdowns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who likely will be installed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the coming days, has implied that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have funded attempts to create a bird-flu virus capable of infecting humans, and that past threats of flu pandemics were concocted by federal health officials both to inflate their own importance and to pad the pockets of pharmaceutical companies that produce flu vaccines.

Many of Trump’s health appointees are united in their view that the U.S. overreacted to COVID. They—and plenty of Americans—argue that measures such as masking, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates were unnecessary to respond to COVID, or were kept in place for far too long. Faced with another major outbreak, the Trump administration will almost certainly start from that stance.

One way or another, Trump is likely to face some sort of public-health crisis this term. Most presidents do. Barack Obama, for instance, dealt with multiple major public-health crises, each brutal in its own way. Zika didn’t turn into a pandemic, but it still resulted in more than 300 American children being born with lifelong birth defects. Ebola, in 2014, killed only two people in the U.S., but allowing the virus, the death rate of which can be as high as 90 percent, to freely spread across America would have been catastrophic. In 2009 and 2010, swine flu led to more than 12,000 deaths in the U.S.; roughly 10 percent of the victims were under 18. Even if bird flu does no more than it already has, it’ll still cause a headache for the White House. Bird flu continues to wreak financial havoc for farmers, which is then trickling down to consumers in the form of higher prices, particularly on eggs.

Step by step, the U.S. keeps moving closer to a reality where the bird-flu virus does spread among people. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that cows have now contracted the variant of the virus that was responsible for the recent fatal case in the United States. That means the chances of humans catching that strain are now higher than they were: Many recent human cases have been in dairy farmworkers. As cases of seasonal flu increase too, so does the chance of the bird-flu virus gaining mutations that allow it to spread freely between humans. If both viruses infect the same cell simultaneously, they could swap genetic material, potentially giving the bird-flu virus new abilities for transmission.

Parker clearly understands this danger. Last year, he spoke to USA Today about the potential for the virus to mutate and change the outlook of the current epidemic. He also wrote on X that “federal, state, and private sector leaders need to plan for challenges we may face if H5N1 were to make the fateful leap and become a human pathogen.” How much leeway the Trump administration will give Parker—or whoever does run the pandemic-preparedness office—to keep the U.S. out of calamity is another matter.

Plenty of public-health experts have come to look back at the coronavirus pandemic and regret certain actions. Should bird flu worsen, however, many of the same tools could become the best available options to limit its toll. Parker, for his part, expressed support during the worst parts of the pandemic for masking, social distancing, and vaccinations, and although he said in 2020 that he doesn’t like lockdowns, his social-media posts at the time suggested he understood that some amount of community-level social distancing and isolation might be necessary to stop the disease’s spread. How eager the Trump administration will be to use such tools at all could depend on Parker's ability to convince his colleagues to deploy them.

The White House pandemic-response office was set up to play air-traffic control for the CDC, the NIH, and other agencies that have a role amid any outbreak. But having a job in the White House and a title like director of pandemic preparedness does not guarantee that Parker will be able to win over the crew of pandemic-response skeptics he will be tasked with coordinating. And his job will be only more difficult after Trump sniped at the purpose of the office, telling Time in April that it “sounds good politically, but I think it’s a very expensive solution to something that won’t work.”

Although Trump appears to have thought better of dissolving the entire office, its director can’t really succeed at fulfilling its purpose without the president’s support. The only thing that could make persuading a group of pandemic skeptics to care about an infectious-disease outbreak more difficult is your boss—the president of the United States—undercutting your raison d’être. Parker has some sense of the enormity of the job he’d take on. In 2023, he tweeted, “Pandemic Preparedness, and global health security have to be a priority of the President and Congress to make a difference.” In 2025, or the years that follow, he may see firsthand what happens when the country’s leaders can’t be bothered.

Pfizer (PFE) CEO Albert Bourla told investors Tuesday morning that he is “cautiously optimistic” about working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the expected next head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

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