RFK Jr. Reveals DOGE Fired Some People by Mistake

A fifth of the jobs slashed at the Department of Health and Human Services were actually a mistake, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.

Under the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the health agency fired some 10,000 employees this week in an ongoing government reduction effort that Kennedy has said could downsize his department’s 82,000-employee workforce by as much as a quarter.

But by Kennedy’s own admission, that process is apparently so haphazard, rushed, and inefficient that it basically has to involve major mistakes that undermine the department’s work.

“Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday. “We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.”

Kennedy noted that some of the employees affected were not in administrative roles, as DOGE had promised, and that the layoff had affected the agency’s research work. One such program included a team of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that monitors lead exposure in children.

“There were some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” Kennedy said.

Other shuttered departments were responsible for research and policy recommendations on older adults, disabilities, HIV, minority health, mine safety, and smoking. It is unclear if these are among the research priorities that will return.

The negligent error is just one recent instance in which the “shock and awe” of the Trump administration’s federal makeover has resulted in dud details and mass confusion.

Since January, the Trump administration has fired more than 100,000 federal employees, killing the Education Department and attacking the Environmental Protection Agency. Mass layoffs were also conducted at the Department of Energy in February, where DOGE similarly and mistakenly nixed critical workers focused on nuclear safety.

Bringing those employees back wasn’t as easy as simply having them return to work the next day. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration were reportedly considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

But tens of thousands more government jobs are expected to be on the chopping block as Trump pursues a second round of “voluntary” buyouts in the coming weeks.

The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf, condemned the Health Department layoffs in a statement on LinkedIn.

“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Califf wrote, describing the action as “a dark day for public health.”

Donald Trump is defending his tariff plan with poorly sourced hype videos.

The president shared an X video, a copy of a TikTok post, to his Truth Social account Friday morning calling his economic plans “genius” without much substance. The video starts out by saying Trump is crashing the economy on purpose and that billionaire investor Warren Buffett is praising the president for making “the best economic moves he’s seen in 50 years.”

This isn’t true at all, though. Last month, Buffett openly called Trump’s tariffs “a tax on goods” in an interview.

“Tariffs are actually, we’ve had a lot of experience with them. They’re an act of war, to some degree,” Buffett said. “I mean, the tooth fairy doesn’t pay ’em! And then what? You always have to ask that question in economics. You always say, ‘And then what?’”

Trump’s video goes on to make several other unsourced claims, including that the Federal Reserve will be forced to slash interest rates in May, allowing trillions of dollars in debt to be refinanced inexpensively. The video also claims that the dollar will be weakened and that mortgage rates will drop, and repeats Trump’s claims that tariffs will compel businesses to build in the U.S. and force farmers to sell more crops stateside as well. There is no indication that any of this will happen. Indeed, Trump is practically begging—or maybe threatening—Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to slash rates.

The video shows that Trump is deluded that his tariffs are going to succeed and is pushing any source that backs him up. The TikTok account that the video comes from lacks credibility, as it doesn’t even have a bio and seems to only post summary videos of news events without any indication of who is making them. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to plummet and Americans continue to worry about their jobs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent may be planning to cut and run after Donald Trump’s disastrous “reciprocal tariff” announcement earlier this week.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Friday, contributor Stephanie Ruhle reported that the key Cabinet member is already looking for an escape hatch.

“My sources say that Scott Bessent is kind of the odd man out here and, in the inner circle that Trump has, he’s not even close to Scott Bessent or listening to him,” Ruhle said. “Some have said to me, he’s looking for an exit door to try to get himself to the Fed, because in the last few days he’s really hurting his own credibility and history in the markets.”

To be sure, Trump’s tariff policy represents a sort of defeat for Bessent, a former hedge fund manager who entered office under the delusion that he might actually succeed in stopping Trump from wrecking the economy. Should he flee the administration now, he would likely forfeit what little credibility remains.

Bessent warned other countries Wednesday not to make any rash decisions in reaction to Trump’s sweeping “retaliatory tariff” policy, which included a 10 percent baseline tariff on almost every country in the world.

“My advice to every country right now is: Do not retaliate. Sit back, take it in, let’s see how it goes. Because if you retaliate, there will be escalation. If you don’t retaliate, this is the high-water mark,” he warned.

Bessent’s warning came off particularly clueless given that democratically elected foreign leaders are likely beholden to their electorate, who won’t take lightly to Trump’s blatant bullying.

Ruhle’s sources told her Bessent must understand just how ridiculous Trump’s tariff policy is because he “actually understands how the markets work, and what’s happening right now is only going to hurt markets,” she said.

And it already has: The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite experienced their single worst sessions since 2020 on Thursday. Bessent’s nomination had received strong Republican support because of his experience with financial markets.

“And even for Scott Bessent to say a few weeks ago, you know, getting cheap goods fast is ‘not part of the American dream.’ No, it’s not part of the American dream, but it’s part of the way Americans live, especially people who are economically vulnerable,” Ruhle said. “They don’t have the option to say, ‘No, I’d like higher things that cost more.’ They need low-cost things because they don’t make that much money.”

Already, countries are ignoring Bessent’s weak warning. China announced Friday that it would impose a reciprocal 34 percent tariff on all imports from the U.S. Trump had levied two rounds of 10 percent duties on all Chinese imports, and then an additional 34 percent tariff on Wednesday. It’s easy to see how prices can quickly add up for working- and middle-class Americans who have relied on cheap products from countries like China.

Before he was nominated to serve in the Trump administration, Bessent had defended the use of tariffs as a form of sanctions. He told Bloomberg in August that tariffs were a “one-time price adjustment” and were “not inflationary.”

“I think that tariffs in a way can be regarded as an economic sanction without a sanction. If you don’t like Chinese economic policy, flooding the market with over production, you could put a sanction on them, or a tariff,” Bessent said at the time.

Donald Trump is looking for a scapegoat to redirect America’s tariff fury.

The president attempted to influence Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ahead of the head banker’s remarks Friday, insisting that the chairman should cut interest rates.

“This would be a PERFECT time for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut Interest Rates,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “He is always ‘late,’ but he could now change his image, and quickly.”

Trump then claimed that energy prices, interest rates, inflation, and egg prices are down. (Energy prices, interest rates, and inflation are actually not down. Egg prices, however, are $3 a dozen again.) The president also claimed that jobs are “up,” likely referring to the jobs report he celebrated earlier Friday that assessed positive job growth in the U.S. economy before he implemented tariffs that cratered the stock market.

“A BIG WIN for America,” Trump wrote. “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!”

Rate cuts, however, would not be an imminent and forthcoming solution to the market chaos, according to the chairman.

“We don’t need to be in a hurry,” Powell said later Friday. “We are well positioned to wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments to our policy stance. It is too soon to say what will be the appropriate path for monetary policy.”

Overall, Powell’s speech did not spell good news in the wake of Trump’s sweeping tariff plan. Powell described Trump’s tariffs as “significantly larger than expected” and predicted that the levies would contribute to—at minimum—a “temporary rise in inflation,” though he noted that the “effects could be more persistent.”

The decision to cut interest rates or not was a major sticking point between Trump and Powell toward the end of Trump’s first term, when the Covid-19 pandemic sent the economy on a roller-coaster ride.

Economists have predicted that the tariffs could throw the U.S. into a recession. Trump’s plan has been interpreted around the globe as an economic attack, forcing the leaders of some of America’s longest-term allies to turn away from U.S. leadership.

“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States … is over,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday, as if delivering a eulogy for the two nations’ relationship, the day after Trump unveiled the plan.

“Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over,” Carney said. “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over.”

A new poll has Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez handily beating Senator Chuck Schumer head-to-head in the 2028 New York primary.

Fifty-five percent of likely Democratic voters preferred Ocasio-Cortez according to the survey, which was conducted by the liberal group Data for Progress, while 36 percent preferred Schumer. Nine percent went undecided.

This underscores the reputational damage Schumer has taken in the early days of Trump’s second term, particularly after he decided to advance a GOP spending bill without seeking concessions rather than shut down the government, completely capitulating to Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s extremist agenda. Schumer argued that shutting the government down was a worse look than giving Trump a blank check, but the Democratic base disagrees.

“I think that’s absolutely wrong. Republicans control the House, they control the Senate, they control the Oval Office. They’d be voting against our measure to keep the government open,” Senator Jeff Merkley said at the time. “I think America would understand that this is a Republican shutdown, if there was a shutdown.… You don’t stop a bully by handing over your lunch money, and you don’t stop a tyrant by giving them more power.”

This poll also emphasizes the ideological struggle that rages on within the Democratic Party. While Schumer and other moderates cancel book tours and blame the party’s “woke” left, Ocasio-Cortez had been barnstorming towns with Bernie Sanders, railing against oligarchy and making the progressive case for the party’s future.

Schumer’s approval rating among Democrats is currently 48 percent, the lowest it’s been since 2019.