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.

Under orders from President Trump, the EPA is trying to fast track the clean-up of toxic debris from LA's fires.

In Wisconsin, where late last year Donald Trump said at a campaign stop, “I’m an environmentalist … I want clean air and clean water—really clean water,” many people want that too. Like Americans across the country, many Wisconsinites have in recent years come to understand that they have been drinking water contaminated by highly toxic “forever chemicals,” compounds known as PFAS, for decades.  

This is a challenge for Trump the environmentalist, whose administration is widely expected to gut many environmental regulations and has already suspended work that would have put limits on PFAS. Yet Lee Zeldin, now the EPA’s administrator, said in his confirmation hearing last month that PFAS would be a “top priority” for the agency, and as a member of Congress, he sided with Democrats to back rules that would limit the chemicals in drinking water and make polluters pay for cleanup.

PFAS are the rare environmental issue that might evoke the bipartisan zeitgeist in which Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. By then, President Richard Nixon had already overseen the creation of the EPA but vetoed the landmark water bill, which he thought was too expensive. But 17 Republicans joined with Democrats to override his veto. “If we cannot swim in our lakes and rivers, if we cannot breathe the air God has given us, what other comforts can life offer us?” Senator Howard Baker, a Republican of Tennessee, said on the October morning of the vote.

In this century, some Republicans have argued that PFAS measures are costly and come with legal burdens for businesses; the chemical industry has lobbied heavily against regulation in the U.S. and abroad. But like the environmental disasters of the 1970s, this one is alarming enough that politicians who might otherwise oppose regulation want the government to do something about it.

In his first term, Trump’s EPA issued a PFAS Action Plan to designate the compounds as hazardous, set limits, and make cleanup recommendations. But the White House also opposed a PFAS bill in Congress after the chemical industry objected to it, and the closest the administration came to fulfilling its own plans was submitting a proposal to regulate PFAS in drinking water on its very last day. In the next four years, PFAS could test whether Trump’s version of the EPA—stripped of many career employees and staffed with industry lobbyists—can do the job millions of Americans may want it to.

PFAS, as I’ve written before, are the DDT of this era, though perhaps it is more accurate to say they’re worse: Where DDT was a single compound with a single use, PFAS is an umbrella term for thousands of compounds used in a plethora of quotidian ways. They are often the reason “performance” fabrics on couches can resist stains, a rice cooker wipes clean so easily, and boots are waterproof. They make paper plates grease-resistant and conditioner extra silky. In the places where they are manufactured or are used to manufacture other things, decades of effluent have contaminated groundwater and fed into municipal water supplies. No one has figured out how to destroy the compounds, whose fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable in organic chemistry, at scale.

And so they persist, virtually forever, cycling through the water system and accumulating in our bodies. PFAS weren’t a known concern when the Clean Water Act was created, nor were they on anyone’s radar when the Safe Drinking Water Act came into force in 1974. By the ’70s, however, 3M knew that a PFAS compound it had invented, and sold to DuPont to make Teflon, was accumulating in employees’ blood.

Now nearly every American has PFAS in theirs. Over the past half century, these compounds have been used in dozens of industries to manufacture thousands of products globally, creating a noxious waste stream that has infiltrated countless communities. Studies have linked exposure to PFAS with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, and developmental problems in children, among other issues.

Last year, some two decades after the EPA began investigating these compounds, the Biden administration ordered water utilities to test for several kinds of PFAS in their water, and then begin all but eliminating those compounds, for the first time. The agency says that, much like for lead, there is no safe level of two of the most common of these compounds. It also released a report warning of the dangers of spreading sewage sludge—often highly contaminated by PFAS—on fields as fertilizer, a practice that continues in many states. And it was about to set the first discharge limits for PFAS in industrial wastewater—a rule the Trump administration has now put on pause. (An EPA spokesperson told me this action was part of “common transition procedures.”) This means municipal water systems will have to test for PFAS, but manufacturers will not need to measure or limit PFAS in the wastewater they release to those systems.

In the meantime, American towns and cities are trying to deal with PFAS’s threat piecemeal. In Campbell, Wisconsin, a town on a riverine island where people watch bald eagles hunt for fish, and raise their kids in the houses where they were raised, water samples from residents’ wells first came back positive for PFAS in 2020. Firefighting foam, made of PFAS, was used to put out plane-crash fires and to train firefighters at a nearby airport for decades. Residents now wonder if that explains the many unusual diagnoses among their neighbors, Lee Donahue, a Campbell town supervisor, told me: testicular cancer in a 20-year-old, or an ovarian cancer that usually strikes later in life in a woman in her 30s.

Nearly five years after those water tests, residents are still drinking bottled water while the town board works to reroute the drinking-water supply away from contaminated wells and toward a new source. That switch is partly funded by grants from President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Trump has put on pause, and partly by EPA grants secured by Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, and the town’s representative, Derrick Van Orden, a Republican. “This isn’t the most popular Republican position, I don’t really care,” Van Orden told the local ABC affiliate at the time the grant was announced. “When you turn on your faucet, it doesn’t ask if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

Campbell is a microcosm of a swing state: It split its vote almost exactly 50–50 between Trump and Kamala Harris, Donahue, who is also a town election worker, told me. On the other side of the state, Marinette, a city of 11,000, is an “extremely red community” that is dealing with its own PFAS problems, Cindy Boyle, a former town-board chairperson, told me. At 53, Boyle realizes she may have been drinking water tainted with PFAS her whole life: Tyco Fire Products tested its firefighting foam on land a half mile from the house where she raised her three sons, and its effluent was spread as sludge on fields within a mile of the house she grew up in, she said. The company was sued by the state, public water systems, and some residents in the area. Boyle was not one of them; still, the company is now providing a whole-house filter at her home, and distributing bottled water. (Tyco settled the suits with the water systems and residents without admitting wrongdoing; the state’s suit is on pause.)

But damage may have already been done. She had her thyroid removed in her 30s; her sister has thyroid disease now, and her mother had kidney cancer. Her husband has Parkinson’s disease; recent research shows that PFAS can accumulate in the brain and links them to neurological disorders. Boyle is registered independent from a conservative family, and she’d “take a Bush any day now,” she told me. But she says she can’t vote for anyone who isn’t interested in clamping down on PFAS.

In Wisconsin, Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in a battle at the statehouse over how to do that. Republicans have been holding up a proposed fund for testing and remediation out of fears it could force landowners to pay for cleanups of pollution they didn’t cause; on Tuesday Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, announced a state budget meant to resolve their concerns and release the funds—if the legislature passes it.

In the absence of federal regulation, states’ efforts to address PFAS have been patchwork and politically unpredictable. In West Virginia, which voted for Trump by a ratio of 7 to 3 and is arguably the birthplace of the PFAS crisis in the U.S., former Governor Jim Justice, a Republican, passed legislation to curb it. In North Carolina, where an estimated 2.5 million residents have PFAS in their tap water, Republican appointees to a state commission have stalled rule making that would set clear limits on PFAS’s presence there. Maine, which has a Democrat-controlled legislature and a widespread PFAS crisis, has passed some of the most stringent PFAS bills in the nation. New York was among the first states to declare certain PFAS hazardous substances, but it also plans to double the volume of sludge it spreads on fields by 2050.   

Tackling PFAS contamination meaningfully will require federal effort. During Trump’s previous term, he appointed a former chemical-industry executive to oversee toxic chemicals at the EPA, where she rewrote rules, making it harder to track their health impacts. Back then, Americans in some states were just beginning to understand the threats PFAS posed. Now, eight years later, the landscape is very different—and states are watching. In his time as a congressional representative from New York, Zeldin was in favor of getting rid of PFAS contamination, going so far as to urge the EPA to move faster to regulate it. At his confirmation hearing, he gave no details of how he would proceed on PFAS as EPA administrator, and when I asked the EPA for more specifics, a spokesperson pointed me to the action plan from the first term. Whatever steps Zeldin does take will show what making an issue a priority looks like for Trump’s EPA in this term, and define how far this administration’s environmentalism actually goes.