This week at Unbreaking, August 21
The administration’s massive cuts to the federal government harm both the workers left without jobs as well as everyone who depends on government services (which is to say, all of us). This week, we’re noticing how those cuts make financial services riskier, reduce food safety, and have the potential to cause thousands of unnecessary deaths. Plus, what we’re learning as we build out our data security explainer.
Equality at work
In one of many ongoing court cases about the validity of the administration’s massive layoffs, an appeals court ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) can proceed with a layoff that encompasses nearly the entire agency, reducing staff from approximately 1,400 employees to only 200. The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis with the aim of protecting Americans from “unfair, deceptive, and abusive financial practices.” Its dismantling — at the same time that Trump is opening up retirement accounts to cryptocurrency — raises alarms about the safety of financial products going forward. As with other attacks on federal workers, the consequences of these mass layoffs are likely to be felt by all Americans for years to come.
Food safety
In late July, the USDA announced plans to transfer over half its DC-based staff, around 2,600 people, to five field offices around the country, as part of a restructuring effort to “ensure the size of USDA’s workforce aligns with available financial resources and agricultural priorities.” In recent weeks, the move has garnered criticism from both regulators and the union representing USDA employees as a thinly veiled effort to force employees to resign, with prior reporting suggesting that the USDA is targeting 30,000 total job cuts across the agency. A report by the US Government Accountability Office found that a smaller relocation of two USDA research agencies during the first Trump administration resulted in a wave of staff attrition. Read about all the attacks on our fragile food safety system in our explainer.
Data security
As we work to build out our data security explainer, we’re encountering great coverage of government surveillance tech, privacy law, and the DOGE staffers who are accessing your data. Some highlights from our reading this week:
- The Intercept has reported on new technologies being built for immigration enforcement and intelligence agencies, while WIRED provides a deep dive on shadowy government contractor Palantir.
- We’ve been reading up on the Privacy Act of 1974 and DOGE’s access to personal data, including a great explainer from Brookings on DOGE’s database and a post from privacy scholar Danielle Citron on DOGE’s betrayal of the Privacy Act’s principles and commitments; the latter includes several Nixon-era quotes about the danger of a “dictatorship of dossiers” that feels very relevant today.
- Finally, we’ve been reading new details from WIRED on a DOGE worker who gained access to Small Business Administration systems with sensitive payroll data for the DOJ, DHS and FBI; plus a long read from Bloomberg about a DOGE staffer who affected the workings of at least ten federal agencies and had an unprecedented level of access to sensitive data.
Medicaid
What’s the cost — in health and lives lost — of the budget reconciliation bill’s Medicaid cuts? This week, we added studies aiming to answer that question to our Medicaid explainer. Researchers estimate that loss of Medicaid and ACA coverage is likely to result in 16,000 to 29,500 unnecessary deaths every year.
Separately, a new study based on internal data shows more than 1.5 million Planned Parenthood visits in 2024 by Medicaid recipients for services other than abortion. The reconciliation bill includes a provision that would essentially ban Medicaid from paying Planned Parenthood for (nonabortion) care. That provision has been temporarily blocked as part of ongoing litigation.
Up next
We’ve spent the last many weeks working on a timeline of the administration’s assault on our immigration system, including the increase in detentions and deportations, rejection of due process, withdrawal of funding for immigrant services, and more. It makes for a harrowing but critically important read. We’ll have it up for you tomorrow.
Until then, we invite you to use and adapt our content for sharing with your readers and communities: everything on our site is available under a CC BY 4.0 license. We welcome translations, adaptations to other formats, and especially encourage organizers and journalists to make use of what we’ve developed. And if you make something with our content, please let us know — we’d love to hear from you.