Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Don Moynihan: So happy to be here.
Moynihan: Yeah, it was pretty extraordinary what happened last night. Initially, the first we heard of this is HHS posted a tweet saying Monarez is out, doesn’t specify if she resigned or if she was fired. Then very shortly after, internal emails and public statements from other CDC leaders started to flow out where they were resigning in protest, pointing to the weaponization of the CDC, pointing to the practices of HHS Secretary RFK Jr. And then Monarez’s lawyer says, Hang on a minute, she hasn’t resigned. She hasn’t been fired. Only—and this is correct—only President Trump can fire her. Secretary Kennedy cannot. She’s the Senate-confirmed appointee and she has not received a letter saying that. We haven’t seen an update. And the latest thing that’s happened is that rank and file, these CDC scientists have walked out of their headquarters in Atlanta in protest of what’s going on. So it is this amazing uprising from the folks whose job is to protect us from serious diseases.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Look, what I will say about this individual is that her lawyer’s statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again. And the secretary asked her to resign. She said she would and then she said she wouldn’t, so the president fired her—which he has every right to do. It was President Trump who was overwhelmingly reelected on November 5. This woman has never received a vote in her life. And the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission. A new replacement will be announced by either the president or the secretary very soon. And the president and secretary Kennedy are committed to restoring trust and transparency and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public-facing, more accountable, strengthening our public health system, and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases.
Moynihan: Monarez has been actually pretty savvy in raising the conflict and salience around what is happening. And this is a position—she for sure is a political appointee that Trump can fire, but historically CDC directors are doctors or, in her case, a scientist. She’s an infectious disease scientist. And so it’s not really the type of position you want to hand to someone who doesn’t have some backing in that area. And it makes it a lot easier then, I think, to tell the public, Hey, diseases are serious things. We should have serious people trying to figure out those threats. And instead, we’re left with RFK Jr. And who knows what type of people who are advising him on things like vaccines.
Moynihan: I think you’re right. And I think they will use abstractions like “Make America Healthy Again” or not aligned with the president’s values. But look, these agencies are public agencies. They have mission statements that were written into statute. They are answerable to Congress. And part of the reason Menares was fired is she consulted with Bill Cassidy about what was going on. And when you get down to the nuts and bolts, the president is not actually a king here. He cannot mandate exactly how the CDC operates without consulting with Congress. And if I was in Congress, if I was Bill Cassidy, I would be saying, What the hell is going on here? Why are we not allowed to talk to senior officials about the ways in which they are managing public money?
Moynihan: Yeah, in practical terms, it dramatically limits access to the vaccine. And this really is conflicting with something that RFK Jr. promised, which is that anyone who wanted a vaccine could get a vaccine. Really, at this point, if you’re over 65, it’s going to be feasible to get a vaccine. For everyone else, it’s going to be a lot harder. You may have to talk to a doctor to be able to access it. And we know that in practice, if you put these administrative burdens in place, that’s going to lower take up or access to these public services. Now that’s a political decision. RFK Jr. is deeply skeptical about vaccines; that is one thing we know true out his entire career. It’s not necessarily an evidence-based decision. And I think that was the crux of his disagreement with Monarez.
Moynihan: Yeah, that is correct. And I think it is emblematic the broader governing philosophy of Trump. This can be framed in terms of unitary executive theory if you want to rely on conservative legal thinking or the way in which Trump says it himself which is I’m the president, I get to do what I want. It is a vision of the presidency where the president is the personification of the executive branch and he gets to have the final word on everything federal agencies do. And that is a really radical departure from how we’ve thought about American government for the last 250 years. It cuts out Congress in a fundamental way.
Moynihan: Yeah, it’s a version of democracy where you say the only election that matters is the presidential election. Congressional elections don’t matter. It’s a version of democracy that says even if you’re making unpopular decisions, they’re still justified because you’re president. And it’s also a version of democracy that eats at any other sources of democratic legitimacy. And again, you point it to statutory language. There are also standards that these federal scientists have to follow in how they evaluate information that have been embedded over time by Congress. Those are other forms of democracy. Those are forms of democracy that historically have actually been pretty effective in making America a superpower over the course of the last 70 or 80 years. And now we’re just seeing an abandonment of all of those other forms of democracy in favor of centralizing authority in the hands of the president, which, to me, feels very at odds with the basic civic textbook understanding of how the founders designed American democracy.
Moynihan: Yeah. If the only person who’s democratically legitimate in your country is the President of the United States, you do you don’t actually have a democracy. You have a monarchy. If the only person who can legitimately exercise power is one individual then that person is a de facto king. They are not part of a democratic order.
Moynihan: It may take generations. And the thing that really should worry everyone is that it’s not just the CDC. So for example, yesterday FEMA employees were put on administrative leave for writing a letter outlining to the public just how bad things have become within FEMA. EPA employees have been put on administrative leave for the same reason. Agency after agency, you see these federal professionals who know that they’re risking their jobs coming out to the public and saying, Things are really bad here, you should be paying attention to how bad things are going. And at some point, things will start to break.
Moynihan: Yeah, one thing we can see is that when you ask the public, Do they prefer a more politicized way of managing government organizations or a more professionalized approach? and that’s the choice that we’re looking at here, the majority tends to prefer a more professionalized approach. That doesn’t mean that they want professionals to have the final say or make the decisions on everything, but they want professionals to be free to give expert-based, evidence-based advice to elected officials and ultimately then allow those elected officials to make the final decisions. And we are straying away from that point because now the professionals feel like if I provide evidence-based information, I’m at risk of getting fired. And that’s what it means to have this politicized bureaucracy whose primary goal is to serve the administration rather than to serve the public.
Moynihan: With Trump being the personification of the administration, the state is him in their worldview.
Moynihan: I think this is an issue that goes back to the 1970s where you see both parties bashing bureaucracy and bashing government. Over time, we see this decline in trust and bureaucracy and it was mostly pretty harmless when no presidents were actually doing much about that rhetoric or acting upon it. Trump really is acting on the anti-government rhetoric in a profound way. And so for Americans, I think we’re going to be in a period of hopefully civic education about what the bureaucracy actually does.
Sargent: Really critically put. I just want to point out that your parallel to Katrina could actually spool out in other ways as well in the following sense. You could really see the incompetence issue and grotesque mismanagement issue becoming much, much bigger in the public mind precisely because they’re throwing the public health system into chaos. And in many ways, that could be politically a whole lot worse than Katrina because Katrina, as awful as it was, was an event in one place in the country that highlighted horrible bureaucratic mismanagement, catastrophic mismanagement. But the public health system faltering for Americans and then that getting pinned on Donald J. Trump?
Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. And I think that’s a preview of some really, really bad stuff to come, and that it will get hung around Donald J. Trump’s neck. Don Moynihan, thanks for coming on, man. Great to talk to you.
Moynihan: My pleasure. Thank you.
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