Copy, paste, tweak, submit. How CDC and other HHS employees are powering through the Trump administration's pointless weekly "What I did last week" emails.
“We're all just putting a bunch of nonsense."
Hi all. One main story that you’ll love and then a few quick hits. And I hope to see many of you later today on Substack Live with Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck at 4 p.m. ET. An email will go out when we start.
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DOGE is making the HHS less efficient. CDC and other HHS workers aren’t having it.
A few weeks ago, the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management emailed all federal employees, telling them to send a list of “approx. 5 bullet points” itemizing what they had achieved at work in the previous week. After Elon Musk initially said that failure to comply would be interpreted as resignation (on X/Twitter), a number of agency leaders told employees to ignore the email. Eventually, federal employees were informed that they had to respond, but to maintain security, they were told to provide as little information as possible. Rather than abandon the increasingly pointless endeavor, the Musk-Trump administration has turned the whole charade into a weekly requirement that will accomplish nothing. It’s obvious that Elon Musk thinks this will help determine who is doing important work and should stay and who isn’t and should be terminated. But it’s equally obvious that he's out of touch and delusional.
The CDC employees that I know—and there are literally dozens at this point—are too busy actually working to have time for this kind of bullshit. The likelihood that Elon Musk and President Trump would even understand why a lot of the work that rank-and-file CDC employees carry out is important is low anyway.
Therefore, in order to push back against DOGE-implemented inefficiency, CDC workers seem to have identified a shared goal: to spend as little time on this government-imposed make-work as possible.
The main solution? Command-C, Command-V.
Indeed, multiple CDC employees I spoke to yesterday said that, mostly, they just copied and pasted last week’s required emails, making just enough changes that the emails are not identical, but not so many that the process eats into time doing actual work.
“Copy, paste. It's so general I don't see the point of changing it,” one CDC employee said. This aligns with what their supervisors told them to do previously. “Next week maybe I'll just write, ‘Yes, I am still alive and working,’ since apparently it's just supposed to be a pulse check,” the unamused career professional told me.
Some employees can’t resist engaging in outright resistance. “We're all just putting a bunch of nonsense,” an employee at another HHS agency told Inside Medicine. “Some people are making their bullets start with [specific] letters so it forms a word like ‘fascist,’ or ‘racist,’ or ‘fuck you.’”
On a more practical level, however, some managers have taken to helping their direct reports get through the pointless task with minimal effort and wasted time. “Given HHS directions to keep things high level, it's hard to have much variability from week to week,” another CDC employee told Inside Medicine. To save time, these managers have developed templates that people can tweak just enough to accomplish the inane task. They’ve even provided some examples that can then be tailored. The idea is to take a task that could easily eat up a chunk of valuable worker time and render it a quick (and even more useless) exercise each week. “We are trying to take the stress off people…Get it to be less than 5 minutes a week,” the source said. That said, some Centers and Divisions might have more trouble standardizing things, so not all CDC workers are able to finish the errand so quickly.
Asked how they planned to respond this week, another CDC employee simply deployed the 🤪 emoji. Overall, the ongoing exercise was described by one of the employees succinctly: “So stupid.”
Honestly, I love these people. In the face of stupidity, they’re giving snark and getting back to work.
Three quick stories and a reminder about today’s Substack Live with Steve Vladeck and me.
I worked clinically and I’m preparing for at least one bigger Inside Medicine piece later this week, so I need to keep this brief and get some much-needed sleep over here. But I’m flagging three stories that we should know about and keep in mind.
The NIH is poised to terminate grants that study vaccine hesitancy, Science reported. First, this seems to align with RFK Jr.’s thinly veiled past anti-vaccine sentiments. Second, studying why people choose not to vaccinate is extremely important. As I said yesterday, oftentimes innovation is what excites people. But if we care about saving lives, the return on investment is often greatest when we focus on improving implementation of things that we already know work. So, this is really toxic. Third, this is another example of the NIH making cuts based on “agency priorities,” rather than sweeping, non-specific budget reductions. DOGE lawyers probably believe that a series of “smaller” decisions like this will be more likely to hold up to legal challenges.
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the US Government must keep its financial commitments (fancy, that), the district judge who made the earlier ruling has itemized how that should happen, which includes hundreds of payouts per day for work that was completed until February 13, according to a LinkedIn post by Robert Nichols, an expert and consultant for many USAID and other global aid projects. According to Nichols, some parties may be able to seek damages based on the US government’s capricious actions. His post also outlines how aid partners affected by the Musk-Trump administration’s near destruction of our life-saving foreign aid programs might best maximize cost recovery during any termination negotiations.
After rumors to this effect, the US government finally ended its free Covid-19 rapid test program. The Covid test website simply says that the “free at-home COVID-19 test distribution program is not currently accepting orders.” It’s unclear if this is permanent. My guess is that it is.
Don’t forget to join Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck and me in the Doctors Lounge on Substack Live today at 4 p.m. ET.
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The future of COVID vaccines is unclear with ACIP on hold and the high likelihood of David Weldon as head of CDC. That concerns me more than getting 4 expired tests.
you're not wrong. I like to use the term Unclassified but Sensitive to discuss any current operations or responses, when reporting back to DOGE. DOGE computer servers are unsecured and are linked to a variety of secured systems within the Executive Branch. As the weakest link, DOGE's system is the most vulnerable and is most likely been compromised by foreign adversaries or 3rd party actors, working on behalf of our adversaries. 2M employees providing a weekly summary of their activities, no matter how benign, is a wealth of information that could be mined for useful intelligence.