Blowing Out America’s Brains

Despite making up only 2% of the body’s weight, the human brain consumes 20% of its energy. If we follow Elon Musk’s DOGE-driven reasoning, which places great value on blind action and breaking things, the brain should be eliminated entirely. Just imagine the savings!

Absurd? Welcome to Washington, where Musk and his army of pimple-faced teenage hackers gleefully remove the very parts of government that help us survive—our nation’s brain. Under the Trump Administration’s new directive, thousands of public health workers were unceremoniously fired this week, including researchers, doctors, scientists, inspectors, and communications staff. Agencies like the CDC, NIH, and FDA have been gutted. Entire departments tasked with tracking disease outbreaks, regulating food and drugs, and preventing poisonings, birth defects, and public health crises are vanishing before our eyes.

If infectious diseases had a sense of humor, they’d be laughing. If snake oil salesmen had hearts, they’d be bursting with joy. And if Americans don’t wake up, the consequences won’t be measured in dollars; instead, they’ll be measured in lives.

The tragedy here is twofold. First, we’re losing the people and systems that protect us from catastrophe. Second, we’ve forgotten why they existed in the first place. We’ve become cynical about the highly skilled scientists who work in our government agencies. Our cynicism has blinded us to the very achievements that made modern life possible.

A short list of these achievements includes:

• Vaccines and Disease Eradication
  Smallpox is gone, polio is nearly extinct, and measles and rubella were under control until science denial and funding cuts opened the door again. These victories weren’t accidents; they were hard-won by researchers and public health experts now being shown the door.

• Clean Food and Safe Drugs
  The FDA exists so your medicine works and your dinner doesn’t kill you. From inspecting food facilities to approving life-saving treatments, these experts protect us every day. Until now.

• Outbreak Detection and Containment
  From COVID to Ebola to measles, CDC scientists have been our early-warning system. When the CDC is cut, outbreaks spread faster, hit harder, and take more lives. We won’t realize how much we need them until it’s too late.

• Maternal and Infant Health
  Infant mortality has dropped, thanks to decades of public health work, especially in high-risk communities. Cutting staff at the Office of Minority Health isn’t just short-sighted; it’s deadly.

And here we are today, where the very people who brought us these miracles are now being targeted. Why? Because ignorance is easier to manipulate than knowledge. Because science doesn’t bend to political will. And because conspiracy theories are more profitable than the truth.

Public health is not a partisan luxury; it’s a matter of life and death. As thousands of experts are pushed out the door and the lights are turned off in labs and regulatory offices, we open the floodgates to disaster: preventable disease outbreaks, tainted food supplies, poison sold as “miracle” cures, and a surge in misinformation that will cost real lives.

Scientists are not trained and equipped to fight culture wars. They became scientists to heal, not to spar with political ideologues. They are our first and final defense against biological and medical catastrophes. When we reduce them to partisan fodder, call them “deep state,” and treat them as hostile enemies, we destroy the very systems that keep us safe. Scientists reach out to save us, and political hacks cut off their hands.

In the end, removing the brain might indeed save 20% of the body’s energy. But without a brain, the body dies. America, in its current state of political delirium, is sprinting toward that fate. Led by political hacks who take pride in being brainless and blind, they claim they’re cutting fat when, in reality, they’re severing our lifeline.