“The Food and Drug Administration earlier this month fired dozens of staffers responsible for going after retailers who illegally sell tobacco to minors.
Now it’s begging them to come back.
Senior FDA officials asked laid-off employees in recent days to temporarily return after mass cuts decimated the agency’s ability to penalize retailers that sell cigarettes and vapes to minors, four federal health officials familiar with the matter said.”
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“Without aggressive federal oversight, stores would face far less incentive to turn away underage buyers. That could open the door to a reversal in youth tobacco use rates, experts said, undercutting the fight against chronic disease that Kennedy has vowed to make the centerpiece of his agenda. The civil penalties office also served as a key tool in combating growing sales of illicit vapes.
People who smoke cigarettes, use e-cigarettes or other tobacco products primarily begin before they turn 18, research shows, elevating their risk for a range of chronic diseases like lung cancer and heart disease.”
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“It remains unclear why HHS gutted the office focused on civil penalties, which is known within FDA’s tobacco enforcement apparatus as the Division of Business Operations. The Center for Tobacco Products is funded entirely by user fees paid by industry, meaning the terminations won’t create any taxpayer savings. Instead, officials said, it may end up costing money; the fines that the FDA collects from retailers are funneled directly to the federal treasury.
Kennedy, who has singled out smoking as particularly detrimental to Americans’ health, argued in a recent CBS News interview that all the jobs eliminated across HHS were either administrative or deemed redundant.
“In some cases, we cut programs, but we only did that when we consolidated them into another program,” he said. “So the task will continue, their mission will continue. The people are still there for the most part.”
Yet within the FDA, the officials said the cuts effectively collapsed its tobacco enforcement operation.”
Examples and studies show that sometimes firing lots of government workers actually makes the government less efficient because those agencies and departments are understaffed. DOGE is firing any workers it can, not searching for actually unnecessary or bad workers.
“My trepidation boils down to two things. First, for all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington. It feels that it is less about smaller government than it is about political transformation. While the two intersect, this strategy could fall short.
That’s in part—and this is my second point—because for those of us who care about permanently downsizing government and keeping it bound by constitutional rules to prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, DOGE is mixed. While there is a small probability the approach will succeed in reining in spending or the administrative state, it will be at the heavy cost of reinforcing the power of the executive branch and opening the door to the same abuse when the left is in power.
The probability may be higher, however, that they will fail to make a significant difference at all. If that is the case, we will be left with both a presidency on steroids and no meaningful reduction in government.”
Big Trump supporter regrets her Trump vote after she is fired under false pretenses from her government job. She says she got the highest possible rating on her previous review, yet was fired for poor performance.
Trump team thinks workers like her would be more productive in the private sector, and wants to get rid of any impediments to their often illegal and unconstitutional agenda and methods.
“President Donald Trump is trying to revoke collective bargaining rights from most federal employees — the latest move in his aggressive campaign to weaken the federal workforce.
Trump issued an executive order late Thursday night relying on a rarely used provision of the federal labor laws that authorizes the president to exclude agencies from long-standing unionization rights if he determines that those agencies are primarily engaged in national security work.
The order purports to end collective bargaining with federal unions at numerous federal agencies and subdivisions, including the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, State and Veterans Affairs, as well as the EPA and USAID. It also authorizes the Transportation secretary to exclude the Federal Aviation Administration and any other subdivision from labor rights.”
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“The order would eliminate collective bargaining rights from roughly 67 percent of the entire federal workforce, and for 75 percent of workers who are already in a union”
“A month after Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk began directing all federal employees to submit a weekly list of five things they accomplished during the previous week, technical issues have hit the process.
A number of employees across multiple agencies have received bounce-back emails indicating that the mailbox they were directed to email at the Office of Personnel Management is full, thus preventing them from sending their reports, according to multiple emails reviewed by ABC News.
After submitting their weekly “5 Things” email on Monday, some federal employees received an automated response from an OPM email address stating, “The recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now. Please try resending your message later or contact the recipient directly,” according to the emails.”