MEDICAL EXPERTS HORRIFIED BY TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ‘FRIDAY NIGHT MASSACRE’ AT CDC, BUT SOME ARE CALLED BACK. The Trump administration carried out mass layoffs of federal public health officials Oct. 10 that experts warned would leave the US dangerously unprepared to handle disease outbreaks.
As reported by The New York Times Oct. 11, the layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were deep and wide-ranging, and included employees and leaders “in offices addressing respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, injury prevention, and global health.”
The administration laid off the entire CDC office in Washington, D.C., as well as the staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication founded in 1930 that has been credited with the first reporting in medical literature on the disease that would come to be known as AIDS in 1981.
In addition to this, several dozen Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, commonly known as “disease detectives” who track outbreaks across the world, received their termination notices, Bred Reed noted at Common Dreams (10/11).
Dr. Jeremy Foust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, reported in a post on his personal Substack newsletter that CDC insiders are estimating that “between 1,100 and 1,300 employees are being cut” by the Trump administration.
Other public health experts reacted with horror to news of the terminations.
Dr. Catharine Young, a senior fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, described the layoffs as a “Friday night massacre” and warned of severe repercussions for both US citizens and the entire world.
“This isn’t streamlining the government—it’s dismantling our ability to detect and respond to outbreaks before they spread,” she wrote in a post on X. “You can’t cut your way to safety.”
However, the Trump administration on the next day reversed about half of the layoffs at the CDC after hundreds of scientists received “incorrect notifications” that they were laid off during the government shutdown, NBC News reported Oct. 12, citing an official familiar with the matter.
“The employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” the official told NBC News. “This was due to a glitch in the system.”
The reversed layoffs came just after the administration moved to lay off thousands of federal workers during the government shutdown, prompting backlash from critics who argue the layoffs are illegal.
The reduction-in-force moves are being challenged in court and mark the latest fallout from the government shutdown fight, which has stretched into its second week as lawmakers show no signs of moving closer to a deal.
TRUMP HAS HIRED 100+ ‘FOSSIL FUEL INSIDERS’ TO FILL TOP ENERGY, ENVIRONMENTAL ROLES. A top energy adviser to President Donald Trump admitted in an August interview that the administration is offering “concierge, white-glove service” to fossil fuel companies while blocking and defunding clean energy projects, Stephen Prager noted at Common Dreams (10/8).
The comments, reported Oct. 7 by the Washington Post, came from Brittany Kelm, a senior policy adviser for Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC), which was established within the Department of the Interior in February.
“We’re like this little tiger team, concierge, white-glove service, essentially,” Kelm said on the Lobby Shop podcast, “We were put together very particularly with the president’s priorities in mind on energy. So keeping coal plants open, establishing critical mineral mining domestically, and then that broader supply chain.”
She described her role in the council as being to help oil, gas, and coal companies navigate “the politicals” of agencies that grant permits for new projects. Companies, she said, “can walk out of our office, and they have all the contacts they need” for regulators in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the departments of the Interior and Commerce.
“We know how to unstick what is stuck,” Kelm said. “It’s a lot of undoing old policies and getting rid of regulatory burdens.”
Mahyar Sorour, the director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Fossil Fuels policy project, responded: “The reality of fossil fuel companies getting white-glove, concierge service from the Trump administration would be comical if it weren’t so sinister.”
“During the election,” she continued, “Trump told oil and gas executives that he would clear the way for more production without any safeguards if they gave his campaign a billion dollars—they did, and now Trump is blocking clean energy and giving the oil and gas industry immense handouts in return.”
Since retaking office in January, Trump has sought to expand the production of oil, gas, and coal with reckless abandon, without regard to the impacts of carbon emissions on the planet or other environmental impacts of pollution.
As the rest of the world has surged its use of wind and solar projects, surpassing coal for the first time this year, the Department of Energy made a $625 million investment to “expand and reinvigorate the coal industry,” which is the dirtiest form of energy.
And July’s massive GOP budget contained billions of dollars worth of handouts for the fossil fuel industry, boosted drilling on millions of acres of public lands, mandated oil and gas lease sales, and imposed new fees on renewable development.
At the same time, Trump has singlehandedly reduced the US’s growth outlook for renewables by 45%, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
As the Post reports:
[Trump’s] administration has held up permits for solar and wind projects since July and blocked wind farms outright. The Energy Department last week canceled $7.6 billion in funding for projects aimed at curbing climate change including installation of renewables, grid upgrades and carbon capture projects. That’s on top of $27 billion in funding for clean energy that the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to claw back.
COAL MINERS NEVER THOUGHT TRUMP WOULD MAKE BLACK LUNG GREAT AGAIN. Coal miners, who largely work in states that President Donald Trump won by large margins in the 2024 election, are criticizing his administration for failing to enforce federal rules that would limit the spread of potentially fatal black lung disease, Oliver Willis noted at Common Dreams (10/13).
“The coal miners have supplied this country with electricity, and now they’re just cast aside to die,” West Virginia-based Judith Riffe, whose husband died of the ailment, told The New York Times.
A federal rule limiting miner exposure to silica dust—which causes black lung disease—was set to go into effect in April, but it has been opposed in court by the mining industry, which alleges that it’s too expensive to limit the use of the material, despite the health risk.
The Trump administration has decided not to enforce the rule until the court case is resolved, demonstrating its support for the mining industry. But then in September, the administration said that it would put at least $625 million into subsidizing the coal industry—ignoring all environmental impacts.
“The companies might be getting a handout, but the miners ain’t getting none,” Gary Hairston, a retired West Virginia coal miner who has suffered from black lung disease for more than 30 years and is president of the National Black Lung Association, told the Times.
In 2024, Trump won West Virginia by more than 41 percentage points, with 69.97% of the vote. That made it Trump’s second-best performance behind Wyoming, where he received 71.6% of the vote.
The rule to protect miners was proposed in 2024 under President Joe Biden and was the first time in U.S. history that silica dust was regulated.
“We’re making it clear that no job should be a death sentence, and every worker has the right to come home healthy and safe at the end of the day,” Julie Su, who was the acting director for the Department of Labor at the time, said.
Congressional Republicans have voiced their support for holding back the rule. In a July letter to the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration at the Labor Department, House Education and Workforce Committee Republicans complained that the rule is “unwarranted and costly.”
But despite the position of the industry and the Trump administration, mine workers are developing black lung disease at an earlier age. Data shows that the current rate of the disease is back to rates last seen more than 50 years ago, in the 1970s.
Black lung disease is an incurable condition and can lead to deadly outcomes like lung cancer, tuberculosis, and heart failure.
GOP GERRYMANDERING MAY BACKFIRE SPECTACULARLY. It appears Republicans are getting too big for their britches in the Donald Trump-led effort to rig the 2026 midterm elections by redrawing congressional districts to benefit the GOP—hubris that may backfire a bit, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (10/9).
On Oct. 6, Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a new congressional map that actually opens the party up to losing two seats in the state’s four-member U.S. House delegation.
Utah passed the new map under orders from a state judge, who ruled in August that the current Republican congressional gerrymander violated a law that required the state to use a nonpartisan commission when drawing districts.
But rather than make one of the state’s four seats blue by centering it around Democratic-heavy Salt Lake City, as proposed by an independent redistricting commission, Republicans instead redrew the map to split Salt Lake City into two districts, a move that ensures that President Donald Trump carried all four of the state’s new House seats—albeit by smaller margins than the illegal map the judge struck down.
Yet, if a Democratic wave materializes in 2026 amid backlash to Trump and his party’s fealty to his lawlessness, Republicans might actually lose two seats, rather than just one.
“The map has two seats that Trump carried by about 2 and 7 points, respectively. Such a plan might end up being a ‘dummymander’—a situation when the dominant party draws a map to favor it that backfires and produces gains for the opposition party,” Geoffrey Skelley, the chief elections analyst at the outlet Decision Desk HQ, wrote about a draft of Utah’s new map.
The new map will still need to be approved by a judge before it takes effect.
Meanwhile, things are looking good for Democrats in California, where voters are being asked in a November ballot measure whether the legislature should redraw the state’s congressional maps in response to GOP redistricting efforts in Texas.
Punchbowl News reported on Oct. 8 that Republicans appear to be throwing in the towel on California’s redistricting fight, believing that Democrats’ efforts to paint the referendum as a check on Trump’s power will lead the ballot measure to pass. Polls suggest the measure would pass if the election were held today.
If the ballot measure passes, California’s redrawn map would likely neutralize the gains Republicans are seeking to make in Texas.
What’s more, Republicans’ efforts to redraw Indiana’s congressional map appear to be stalling. GOP lawmakers are getting cold feet about trying to axe a Democratic seat, Politico’s Adam Wren reported—so much so that the White House is sending Vice President JD Vance to the state to strong-arm GOP legislators into submission.
Democrats, meanwhile, say that despite Republicans’ best efforts to gerrymander their way to victory, the GOP’s unpopular actions will still sink its House majority next November.
“[Trump] is trying everything possible to keep the House in 2026. All the redistricting in the world isn’t going to help when the Trump health insurance premiums hits,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) wrote Oct. 7 in a post on X. “24 Million voters, many in swing districts, are gonna see their insurance costs increase. Good luck Don!”
RASKIN DEMANDS BACK RECORDS IN PROBE OF $1.5 BILLION IN ‘SUSPICIOUS’ TRANSACTIONS TIED TO EPSTEIN. US House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Oct. 8 sent letters to four major banks demanding records related to more than $1.5 billion in “suspicious” financial transactions tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, Jessica Corbett noted at Common Dreams (10/9).
“Can Bank of America help Congress understand how Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their co-conspirators were able to use your bank and others to conduct more than $1.5 billion in suspicious financial transactions to operate their international sex trafficking ring for years without ever being caught?” Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to the bank’s CEO, Brian Moynihan.
The congressman began his letters to Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robin Vince, Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the same way.
Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender, was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while facing federal charges for sex trafficking. His death was ruled a suicide, but that has been met with deep skepticism. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year federal sentence for her related crimes.
The US Department of Justice has refused to release all of its files on Epstein, heightening public, media, and congressional attention on his friendship with President Donald Trump in the 1990s until their alleged falling out in the early 2000s.
“In September, at a hearing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel, it became clear that the FBI has failed to ‘follow the money’ with regard to more than $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring,” Raskin wrote Oct. 8.
“In light of this startling information, House Judiciary Committee Democrats moved to subpoena financial records related to Jeffrey Epstein from these four banks, but Republicans, with the exception of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky,), blocked these efforts,” he explained, urging the institutions to willingly work with the panel.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, institutions must implement anti-money laundering policies, which include requiring compliance officers, often in consultation with executives, to file a suspicious activity report (SAR) within 60 days of noticing an activity that raises a red flag, “so federal authorities can be alerted to the potential criminal activity and investigate,” the letters stress.
“Despite the public nature of Mr. Epstein’s crimes, and the hundreds of millions of his funds flowing through your bank, it appears Bank of America filed only two significantly delayed SARs relating to his conduct—covering $170 million in transactions between Mr. Epstein and billionaire investor Leon Black,” Raskin wrote to Moynihan.
‘CROOKED COPS’ REPORT DETAILS TRUMP-LED CORRUPTION OF JUSTICE DEPT. The Not Above the Law Coalition on Thursday released a report documenting how President Donald Trump’s administration has been corrupting every aspect of federal law enforcement, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (10/9).
The report, titled Trump’s “Crooked Cops”: The Corruption of Federal Law Enforcement, said that the president has “gone to extreme lengths to appoint top officials with no compunction about abusing their power to pervert justice to punish political enemies and favor political friends,” before showing how these appointees have swiftly eliminated their agencies’ independence from White House political pressure.
“Law enforcement that serves the political interests of the president rather than the public eliminates a core tenet of democracy, namely that we are a country of laws, not of men,” the report emphasizes.
The report begins by recounting how Attorney General Pam Bondi followed direct orders from the president to file criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey, while at the same time noting that she has overseen “a department-wide purge of career officials who were assigned to Trump’s criminal cases or who were suspected to be insufficiently loyal to Trump personally.”
Other Trump officials who feature prominently in the report include FBI Director Kash Patel, who is facing a lawsuit from former agents who have alleged they were fired as part of a “campaign of retribution”; Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who conducted an interview with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, and then moved her “to more comfortable, low-security accommodations” after she told him that Trump had no involvement in her former partner Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activities; and White House border czar Tom Homan, who was allegedly caught on video accepting a $50,000 cash bribe from undercover FBI agents.
The report also takes a swipe at Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who publicly pressured ABC to take late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air mere hours before the network decided to suspend him.
“This was by no means the first instance of Carr weaponizing his regulatory enforcement power for political ends,” the report says. “His threats have been all the more significant as many media companies have business interests pending before the administration.
During a conference call announcing the report, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) described the Trump administration’s actions as ”so distressing and so disturbing,“ and vowed that he was ”not going to stand by while the Department of Justice is used to subvert the rule of law.“
Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), a former federal prosecutor, said on the call that it was ”personally devastating“ to watch the corruption of the Justice Department, and he vowed that House Democrats would be ready to go with oversight investigations should they return to the majority after the 2026 midterm elections.
”Trump is trying to turn this government into his own personal fiefdom,“ said Goldman, who later described the weaponization of the Department of Homeland Security as ”downright scary.“
LIVING WAGE, AFFORDABILITY PLATFORMS HAVE MAJOR ELECTORAL ADVANTAGE, POLLS SHOW. As One Fair Wage launched a new political action committee focused on electing candidates who will push for a true living wage that makes it possible for working people across the US to thrive, the coalition said two new surveys provide a “roadmap for 2026” for candidates and Democratic leaders who are willing to follow it, Julia Conley noted at Common Dreams (10/9).
The polls were conducted by Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners on behalf of One Fair Wage (OFW) and the Living Wage for All Coalition, and found “overwhelming support for living wage policies in competitive swing districts and in major cities.”
In 18 competitive congressional districts across the country, the first survey found that 55% of respondents supported raising the minimum wage for all workers to $25 per hour, even after being exposed to opposition messaging.
Latino voters showed the strongest support at 72%, along with people of color overall at 64%, women at 60%, and people under age 40 at 59%.
With grocery prices harder to afford than they were one year ago in many swing districts, as another poll showed last week, 56% of people said raising the minimum wage is a high or medium priority for them, including 71% of Democratic voters.
The firm also asked voters in major cities with high costs of living, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, whether they supported raising the minimum wage to $30 in those areas, and found similar results.
Two-thirds said they backed gradually raising the minimum wage for all workers to $30 per hour.
“Support is strongest among the very voters Democrats must mobilize to win in 2026 and 2028: Black voters (80%), Latino voters (73%), young voters under 40 (72%), and women (72%) all back the proposal,” Lake Research Partners said.
Support for the proposal was highest in New York City, where Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani (D-36) has included a $30 minimum wage proposal as part of his mayoral campaign platform—one that’s heavily focused on making the city more affordable for all New Yorkers.
Seventy-two percent of New Yorkers said they supported the proposal.
The polling comes as endorsements from lawmakers and advocacy groups that have long been aligned with the Democratic Party have piled up for Mamdani—and as powerful party leaders in New York including US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand have continued to refuse to publicly support the democratic socialist.
Saru Jayaraman, president of OFW, warned that a failure to deliver on affordability and living wages before the midterm elections next year will make ”saving democracy“ from President Donald Trump and the Republican Party impossible.
”We represent 13.6 million restaurant workers in America,“ Jayaraman told Common Dreams. ”And over the last nine months, they’ve repeatedly asked us: ‘You want us to come to a rally on a Saturday to save democracy? I work three jobs and I earn $3 [an hour]. What has democracy done for me lately? Nothing.’“
Along with electing candidates who center living wages and affordability, Jayaraman said in a statement that delivering on the issue ”means passing Living Wage for All legislation in every blue state next spring and ensuring no one is left behind.“
”If Democrats don’t deliver, the right will continue to exploit the affordability crisis to divide working people,“ she said. ”Delivering real affordability is how we restore trust—and how we save democracy.”
Joining OFW in launching the Make America Affordable Now PAC on Thursday are Democratic candidates who are centering affordability and living wages in their campaigns, including Minnesota state Sen. Omar Fateh (D-62), who is running for mayor of Minneapolis; Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson; and US Senate candidate Graham Platner of Maine.
CAMPUS LEADERS MOBILIZE TO BATTLE TRUMP’S ANTI-EDUCATION ‘COMPACT.’ Campus activist groups are banding together to fight against President Donald Trump’s proposed “compact” with universities in which they would receive priority access to federal funding in exchange for pledging support for aspects of the president’s political agenda, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (8/8).
The Sunrise Movement on Wednesday said that students and workers at the universities who have been invited by the Trump administration to sign the compact have “already gathered thousands of petition signatures” urging school administrators to reject it, and they are “planning coordinated campus protests in the coming weeks” to keep the pressure on their schools to resist any effort to infringe upon academic freedom.
The proposed deal with the Trump administration requires that universities abolish institutions on campus that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Additionally, it would completely overhaul admissions processes so that schools are not allowed to consider factors “such as sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, [or] religious associations.”
Critics have said that agreeing to these terms would essentially end schools’ academic freedom, and the Sunrise Movement compiled quotes from both students and professors explaining their opposition to the Trump administration’s proposed deal.
Kelsey Levine, a student at the University of Virginia, said the school’s signature on the agreement would be tantamount to “selling out its most vulnerable populations of students: international students, transgender students, and students of color,” as well as “compromising its foundational principles of independence, truth-seeking, and democracy.”
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, described the Trump administration’s proposal as a “corrupt bribery attempt” that “would usher in a new draconian era of thought policing in American higher education, cripple our technological innovation capacity, and assault our very democracy.”
Evan Bowman, vice chair of Higher Ed Labor United, said that the battle against the Trump administration’s efforts to infringe upon academic freedom were being waged with an all-hands-on-deck effort.
“Workers, students, campus community members across this great country are coming together to fight for a higher education system that actually works for all,” he said. “One that is affordable, strengthens freedom and democracy, and stands up to its public mission.”
Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton University, wrote in The Guardian on Tuesday that all universities must reject Trump’s proposal on the grounds that “it is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom; it is a test case for whether Trumpists can get away with demanding loyalty oaths; it exceeds the president’s powers to begin with; and it is bound to achieve the opposite of its stated goal of ‘academic excellence in higher education.’”
Müller also linked the agreement to what he described as “Trump’s emerging mafia state,” in which “there is no guarantee that those bending the knee will not be bullied again.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Monday that only one institution, the University of Texas at Austin, has so far signaled support for the compact, while others have started to signal their opposition.