In a little over a month, the Trump administration has started to hollow out America’s federal health agencies. Roughly 2,000 probationary workers have been fired en masse, by virtue of the fact that they were relatively new to their jobs. But the long-term impact of those terminations could pale in comparison to a lesser-noticed spate of departures that has recently roiled the health agencies. In the past two months, the FDA, CDC, and NIH second in commands have all resigned or retired. So have several other prominent officials, including the FDA’s chief operating officer as well as the heads of both its food center and its drug center.

There is always some churn in a new White House, but it typically affects “political staff” who are appointed to serve in a specific administration. Civil servants, meanwhile, are far more likely to stay in their positions regardless of who is president. The continuity of these career officials ensures that agencies can still function as their newly appointed political leaders map out their agendas. As in any other industry, career officials—who dramatically outnumber political staff—do sometimes leave. But many of the top staffers who voluntarily abandoned their positions had previously not shown any sign of being ready to do so. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy of the CDC, is reportedly resigning tomorrow, despite telling a Politico reporter in January that he did not have any “current plans to leave government.” And Jim Jones, the head of the FDA’s food center, was just getting started on a long-term plan to revitalize that office. Shah and Jones, like all the other recently departed health officials mentioned in this story, declined to comment.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

The level of attrition happening in the health agencies right now is unprecedented, Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that aims to strengthen the federal bureaucracy, told me. “We’re watching a complete sweep of those most senior career experts,” he said. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “demolish” the so-called deep state, which he believes is out to sabotage his agenda, and has repeatedly declared his intent to gut the health agencies. To an extraordinary degree, his administration has already succeeded.

The administration has offered plenty of incentive for government workers to head for the exit. One of the Trump administration’s first moves was offering a buyout to any federal worker willing to abruptly leave their position. Trump has also mandated that all federal workers, including those who live more than 50 miles from their office, work in office five days a week. It’s unclear how many rank-and-file workers have quit because of these efforts, but prominent instances of attrition have not been limited to just the health agencies. A top Treasury Department official recently retired after reportedly refusing to give DOGE access to the government’s system for doling out trillions of dollars each year. So did 21 staffers at the United States Digital Service who had been drafted into working for DOGE.

Jones, the former director of the FDA’s food center, is instructive in understanding what is fueling the public-health exodus in particular. He joined the agency in 2023, and had spent the past several months staffing up areas of the food center that were faltering. But when 89 newly hired probationary employees were fired by the Trump administration earlier this month, he had enough. He did not want to be involved in “dismantling an organization,” he told the health publication Stat. The health agencies were upended by DOGE cuts just as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the Senate as their boss. The health secretary has his own desires to fire bureaucrats. Had Jones not resigned, it is reasonable to assume that he would have been pushed out of his position: Kennedy had previously implied that everyone at the center Jones ran should be given pink slips.

That’s easier said than done. Although bureaucrats on their probationary period—because they’re either newly hired or recently promoted—can be fired with relative ease, career officials generally cannot be let go without actual cause. But none of that matters if officials resign—whether as a result of their own dissatisfaction or being pressured out. Attrition is a cheat code for thinning the federal workforce. In just a month, the Trump administration’s assault on the federal workforce has managed to push even an ardent reformer like Jones to surrender.

These departures will likely be a cause célèbre for MAGA world. As I wrote in November, public-health officials historically have been the firewall against the political whims of the White House. That is what happened during Trump’s first term. Early in the pandemic, Janet Woodcock, then the head of the FDA’s drug center, reportedly sprang into action to prevent widespread distribution of the unproven COVID treatment hydroxychloroquine over the orders of top Trump officials. What makes the recent resignations so consequential is that they suggest that Trump and RFK Jr. will face less resistance from inside the agencies as they attempt to overhaul public health. Already, Jones has been replaced by Kyle Diamantas, a food and drug lawyer (and hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr.) who has no previous experience working in the federal government.

Still, these resignations may not be to the Trump administration’s benefit. Very few individuals have the type of specialized knowledge that comes with decades in government service. “These are the people that you want to do everything possible to hold on to,” Stier, of the Partnership for Public Service, said. Consider Lawrence Tabak, the outgoing principal deputy director at the National Institutes of Health. He served in that role for more than a decade, punctuated only by a short stint running the entire agency. That experience could have been channeled into delivering Kennedy’s promised reforms to the agency, like revisiting the government’s standards on conflicts of interests in research. Jones, though new to the FDA, had previously spent nearly two decades at the EPA regulating the safety of pesticides and other chemicals, which made him one of the few people prepared to deliver on Kennedy’s promise to ramp up the regulation of food chemicals. Indeed, Jones’s resignation from the FDA has shaken the agency’s staff. One employee who works at the food center described the mood to me as “pissed and scared and coping and numb and confused and demoralized.” (I agreed not to name the employee, because they’re not allowed to speak to the press.)

The federal health agencies have real problems: They’re often slow, bureaucratic, and cloistered, as Trump and Kennedy have been quick to point out. That some of the nation’s top health officials have decided to head for the exit may only make matters worse.

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.  

Douthat came to religion through his parents’ New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn’t follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously.

But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth:

That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?

This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat’s favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat’s purpose is to hasten the process. “Already the time of the new atheism is passing,” he writes; “already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise.

[Read: Evangelicals made a bad trade]

President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so “let’s bring religion back.” Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump’s religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president’s more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.

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Americans love to hate the IRS, that historically unpopular revenue-collection agency with its slow processes and fax machines and many, many forms. But recently, it has started to turn things around, at least by some measures: After receiving tens of billions of dollars from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the agency’s customer-service wait times went down, its tech initiatives helped simplify tax filings for some, and its audits led to the recovery of more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes from wealthy Americans and corporations.

That progress may now be imperiled. As part of the Trump administration’s plan to downsize the federal government, the IRS has been ordered to start firing as many as 7,000 IRS employees in the middle of tax season, including 5,000 people who work on collection and enforcement; the total cuts represent about 7 percent of the agency’s workforce. More layoffs could come: Today, the Trump administration released a memo ordering all federal agencies to submit plans to eliminate more positions, including those of career officials with civil-service protection. The IRS’s acting commissioner, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement this week, and Billy Long, Donald Trump’s pick to replace him, has previously backed legislation that would abolish the IRS.

To imagine the future of a diminished IRS, look back to the 2010s. By 2017, the agency’s workforce had shrunk by roughly 14 percent compared with 2010. The agency’s audit rate was 42 percent lower in 2017 than in 2010. In that period, Americans saw slower refunds and delayed call times. There is a tendency to conflate efficiency with cost cutting, and sometimes leaner operations really do speed things up—but if the IRS can’t afford to update its arcane technology or hire skilled professionals, Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told me, it may struggle to operate efficiently.

In a shift of focus, the IRS has prioritized auditing wealthy people and corporations since receiving IRA funding. In 2022, The Washington Post reported that more than half of the IRS’s audits in 2021 targeted taxpayers whose incomes were less than $75,000, because those audits are simpler and can be automated; auditing wealthy people’s tax returns can require far more resources, especially if they have varied income streams and assets (and sophisticated lawyers or accountants). In May, former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel announced that the agency would drastically ramp up its audits of wealthy corporations and people making more than $10 million. The taxes that rich people evade each year amount to more than $150 billion, he told CNBC in 2024. Investigating them could pay off: A 2023 paper estimated that every dollar the agency spends on audits of wealthy people could translate to $12 in recovered funds. And those who see their peers getting audited may be discouraged from cheating on taxes in the future, Williamson noted.

For generations, politicians have sought to politicize the IRS: In 1971, President Richard Nixon reportedly said that he wanted a new commissioner to “go after our enemies and not go after our friends,” and a former Trump chief of staff told The New York Times that Trump spoke of using the IRS to investigate his rivals during his first term (Trump denied this). The agency’s politicization and unpopularity was part of a “cycle that I hoped we had finally broken,” Natasha Sarin, a law professor at Yale and a former counselor at the Treasury, told me. When an agency struggles to perform its job well, its unpopularity makes getting more funding to improve its operations harder, and so forth.

The future of a major effort to improve the tax-filing system is uncertain too. As my colleague Saahil Desai explained last year, the agency’s pilot of a new, free tax-filing program, Direct File, was “a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans.” That the program “exists at all is shocking,” Saahil wrote. “That it’s pretty good is borderline miraculous.” Elon Musk posted earlier this month that he had “deleted” 18F, the government tech initiative that helped launch Direct File (though Direct File, now under the auspices of the IRS, will continue to accept tax returns for now). And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, in his confirmation hearing, that Direct File would operate this year, but added that he would “study” it for future use.

Staffing—this year and in future filing seasons—is another concern: Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, recommended that taxpayers file as soon as possible, because the IRS workforce may only continue to diminish if some of the remaining employees leave for new jobs, which could lead to tax-refund delays. Many of those who are left are also close to retiring. Before 2022, more than 60 percent of the IRS’s employees were reaching retirement age over the next six years, Holtzblatt told me. A new cohort of younger, more digitally savvy workers (many of whom were probationary agents) was gearing up to replace them. “The long-term effects are potentially worse than what might happen this year,” she said.

More mass layoffs and funding reductions could mean a shrunken and defanged IRS. If the agency doesn’t have the resources it needs to modernize and tamp down tax evasion, revenue won’t be the only thing affected—Americans’ already-shaky trust in the system could be too.

Related:

The government waste DOGE should be cutting The cruel attack on USAID

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Today’s News

Elon Musk, who is not a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, attended the first official Cabinet meeting of the president’s second term. Trump said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be in the United States on Friday to sign a rare-earth-minerals deal, which has been a source of strain between the two countries. An unvaccinated child died from a recent measles outbreak in Texas, the first reported measles death in the U.S. since 2015.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Unemployment is low, but workers aren’t quitting and businesses aren’t hiring, Rogé Karma writes. What’s going on?

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Adolescent Style in American Politics

By Jill Filipovic

To a certain kind of guy, Donald Trump epitomizes masculine cool. He’s ostentatiously wealthy. He’s married to his third model wife. He gets prime seats at UFC fights, goes on popular podcasts, and does more or less whatever he wants without consequences. That certain kind of guy who sees Trump as a masculine ideal? That guy is a teenage boy.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (streaming on Peacock) finds surprising depth and reveals how the beloved British diarist has outlasted her critics, Sophie Gilbert writes.

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“The woman and her sister had been out jogging by the river when they saw the bird fall from the sky.”

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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