Weekly Mind Dump: Trump's War on Government is Costing Lives

A mere five months in, the human cost of the Trump administration's unbridled incompetence has only just gotten underway. Expect countless more lives to be lost.

Week of 6/29-7/5, 2025:

We read about how the Trump administration’s canceling of foreign aid may lead to 8 million children overseas needlessly dying before their fifth birthday over the coming years. To many Americans, that’s an abstraction. Now it’s becoming more graspable as Americans are losing their lives here at home.

Among the 104 confirmed dead in the Central Texas floods are 28 children. Twenty-seven girls from a Christian camp, whose campers ranged in age from 7 to 17, are now also confirmed dead. Dozens more people are still missing.

One of the worst floods in the United States in a hundred years, the question arises: did the weather predictions underestimate the severity of the sudden deluge?

This question is under debate and it will take weeks, if not months, to arrive at a proper assessment. A major part of this debate involves to what extent the Trump administration’s gutting the National Weather Service may have affected its forecasting.

Trump’s White House proposes to slash the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget by nearly a third, around $2 billion, and its 12,000-member staff by 18 percent. It would eliminate the agency’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and cancel funding for its climate, weather and ocean infrastructure, which work to improve forecasting as well as understanding weather patterns. Nearly 900 NOAA staff were summarily fired by DOGE in February.

The New York Times reports that “the National Weather Service’s (NWS) San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge” and that “the Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer.”

Furthermore, “in seven of the 122 NWS stations across the U.S., including in Jackson, Kentucky, where a tornado killed 19 people this month, there will be no round-the-clock operation from 1 June. Of the 122 offices, 30 lack a meteorologist-in-charge,” according to The Guardian.

In May, the former directors of the NWS published an open letter to “the American people,” warning that “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life. We know that’s a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines — and by the people who depend on their efforts.” A former NWS forecaster told the NYT, “I am telling you, the American people are going to suffer from all this. Lives are being put in danger.”

Well, there are, thus far, 104 deceased Texans, including many children, who can attest to that. And as this anti-science administration further eliminates efforts to address climate change, along with inexplicable plans to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), expect the death toll to continue to pile up in coming years.

Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former congressman and TV personality, was confirmed by the Senate a day before the nation’s first passenger airline crash in more than 15 years. An Army helicopter collided with an American Airlines flight near Reagan National Airport in February, killing 67 people.

In May, thousands of flights were delayed and scores canceled at New Jersey’s main airport at Newark as a result of a near breakdown in air traffic control. Air traffic controllers lost complete contact with some flights. They were so shaken by the experience that a fifth were sent home on “trauma leave.”

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, his administration terminated about 400 probationary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees. A court injunction reversed the decision and the employees were rehired. Employees, however, have been encouraged to leave under a program known as “deferred resignation.” As a result, the FAA has lost its chief air traffic official plus a host of other senior officials, including those in charge of five major programs including technical operations, mission support and safety and technical training, the Washington Post reported.

“One day, we’re going to be required to fire 20 percent of everybody,” a senior FAA manager told the Post. “And the next day, Sean Duffy says we’re going to have a huge injection of tens of billions of dollars. It’s just weird.”

Three children are known to have died — needlessly — from measles so far this year, a disease that was virtually eliminated, but is now raging in the southwest. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mismanagement of national health, especially with his medieval ideas concerning vaccinations, many more American lives will be needlessly at risk. Another pandemic could see a repeat, or worse, of the 1.2 million deaths in the U.S. during the COVID epidemic which President Trump at that time said would just “go away.” A Harvard research study published in The Lancet medical journal found that the first Trump administration’s incompetent health policies resulted in 461,000 unnecessary U.S. deaths annually — in addition to 40 percent of America’s COVID-19 deaths, plus 22,000 avoidable deaths annually from environmental policies. That’s quite the body count for a single president.

Fast forward to today: some 10,000 HHS employees, many top scientists and medical experts, have been fired by Kennedy. Many are finding work abroad, constituting a brain drain out of the U.S.

I worry about the country’s national security in connection with Trump’s reckless reductions. State Department employees anxiously await a reported imminent announcement of the mass firing of up to 3500 staff and the planned closure of dozens of overseas diplomatic posts. The administration has told Congress that it intends to cut the CIA’s workforce by about 1,200 personnel and thousands more from other intelligence agencies. FBI Director Kash Patel has dismissed or reassigned hundreds of senior agents, instilled a climate of fear and gutted the counterintelligence division only to bring many back after the U.S.’s military strike against Iran. Special agents are being diverted from fighting crime to going after undocumented migrants.

The National Security Council has undergone two staff purges, including its director. A mere shadow of its former self, the body is barely functional.

Trump’s termination of USAID has already caused the deaths of an estimated 300,000 people, two-thirds of them children, who benefited from our assistance. Millions more will perish of hunger and disease in the coming years.

Trump plans to cut almost $500 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) budget and nearly a third of its workforce, over 1000 people.

The upshot is demoralized work forces and diminished capabilities in the national security agencies. Cashiering thousands of public servants possessing a wealth of specialized talent leaves the country open to attack and theft of secrets by hostile governments, terrorists and criminals. Intelligence failures make us more vulnerable; we thought we learned our lesson after Pearl Harbor. With America’s guard down, expect American lives being lost among our military, intelligence officers and diplomats, not to mention ordinary citizens in the coming years.

The breadth and depth of the stupidity and incompetence of this administration beggars the imagination. The human cost of its misrule, a mere five months in, has only just gotten underway.