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DEAR EDITOR:
The Democratic Party could spell this out clearly and consistently for voters.
The humanitarian aid cuts illegally imposed by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been devastating across the globe. The Prospect's Ryan Cooper has described how DOGE's withdrawal of funding for nutritional support, tuberculosis treatment, malaria prevention, and PEPFAR -- the HIV prevention program that was perhaps the only good thing George W. Bush did -- amounts to a "disease holocaust" likely to kill millions of the world's most vulnerable people.
If it hasn't already, DOGE's onslaught against the federal workforce -- composed of millions of workers in every state -- will soon be responsible for the premature deaths of people throughout the United States, too. The problem with this, as in politics more broadly, is that someone must tell the public who's responsible; they won't always figure it out on their own.
Last weekend's deadly spate of extreme weather is among the latest examples of how Trump and Musk are putting millions of Americans in harm's way. Dozens of people across the Midwest and South were killed by a combination of tornadoes, dust storms, and wildfires between Friday and Sunday. This carnage unfolded just days after Trump and Musk pushed out more than a thousand National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees at the start of peak tornado season, including meteorologists who provide forecasts in National Weather Service (NWS) offices around the country.
What's indisputable is that Trump and Musk's ongoing assault on scientific knowledge and already understaffed federal agencies will exacerbate death and destruction in the future. Dismantling NOAA, the agency tasked with monitoring and warning the public about storms, and shrinking the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for coordinating disaster responses, will needlessly worsen mortality and hardship. There will be more tornadoes, and official wildfire and hurricane seasons are quickly approaching. Virtually every form of extreme weather is growing in frequency, severity, and duration due to planet-heating pollution, which is set to increase further thanks to the Trump administration's embrace of even more fossil fuel production.
These agencies, like others, are being unlawfully defunded in a bid to justify privatization. Before Musk and other rentiers seize public assets, they're deliberately breaking them to "prove" the right-wing myth of public-sector ineptitude. Or we can just blame Hillary Clinton.
BETTS THORPE ADGATE
Cortland