from WNYC studios I'm Brian Lerer this is my daily politics podcast it's Tuesday October 14th

today the ongoing turmoil at the centers for disease control and the implications for keeping track of what's

making, what's sickening Americans and what's killing us. The agency terminated around 1,300

employees on Friday, not just furloughed in the shutdown, but laid them off. But then quickly

work to rescind about half of those notices the next day.

That's according to the union that represents federal employees.

So what happened here?

The New York Times reports those rehired were, quote, mistakenly fired in what appeared to be a substantial procedural lapse.

So at least more doge-like sloppiness, we can say.

The remaining 600 still laid off were in offices, including the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control,

the National Center for Health Statistics, and the CDC's Washington

office, which is the channel for communications with Congress, all of that as described by Axios.

Health and Human Services Communications Director Andrew Nixon said the government acts, quote,

non-essential employees. Now, on Friday evening, President Trump, speaking to reporters in the

White House with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., behind him, suggested the layoffs would

target, quote, Democrat-oriented agencies in response to Democrats not voting to approve a stopgap

measure to fund the government. Listen. How many layoffs have you authorized for this first round and from which agencies?

And it will be Democrat-oriented because we figured, you know, they started this thing,

so they should be Democrat-oriented.

While several other agencies were impacted by the layoffs, the CDC was hit particularly hard. I guess they consider it

Democrat to count how many people are getting sick or dying in from what? This is the latest

of several incidents impacting the agency, including back in April, and we talked about it at the time

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