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Over the weekend, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) accidentally fired several employees who were working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 bird flu outbreak. The USDA are now backpaddling in order to rehire these workers at a time when bird flu is ravaging the US poultry population and contributing to the rise in egg prices across the country.
“Although several positions supporting [bird flu efforts] were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” a USDA spokesperson told NBC News.
"USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and we are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfill our statutory mission."
The terminations come as part of the Trump administration’s widescale effort to cut the size of the government and shrink the federal workforce. The USDA has noted that some agency position are already exempt from these cuts, as the agency “continues to prioritize the response to highly pathogenic avian influenza."
However, this error comes off the back of another mistake that occurred last week, when the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) fired nuclear safety employees who help oversee the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Although the NNSA attempted to rescind these terminations, it reported on Friday that it was struggling to contact them as it did not have their current contact details and former staff couldn't access their emails.
The decision to fire the agency employees working on the bird flu outbreak comes as the virus has already caused substantial issues across the country. The current outbreak has led to the deaths of millions of egg-laying chickens, which has caused the price of eggs to rise sharply in recent months. In March last year, the infection was confirmed in dairy cattle in Texas and soon spread across the country via contaminated raw milk.
So far, 68 cases of bird flu have been confirmed in humans in the US.
These are several agencies within the Agriculture Department that play important roles in the nation’s response to bird flu. These include the Agriculture Research Service and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. It seems Trump’s layoffs, which are being spearheaded by Elon Musk and the US Department of Government Efficiency – a department with many employees who allegedly have no experience in government – have also hit the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, another agency that is involved in avian flu research.
