New York Times: ‘Like a Hand Grasping’: Trump Appointees Describe the Crushing of the CDC
“Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, were installed in 2018 as two of the youngest political appointees in the history of the world’s premier public health agency, young Republicans returning to their native Georgia to dream jobs. But what they witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic this year in the CDC’s leadership suite on the 12-floor headquarters here shook them: Washington’s dismissal of science, the White House’s slow suffocation of the agency’s voice, the meddling in its messages, and the siphoning of its budget. In interviews this fall, the pair decided to go public with their disillusionment…” (Weiland, 12/16).