A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.
So one hopes that the voting public is learning a hard—or I should say watery—lesson about how important good government is, by way of the manifold consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy hacking away at American state capacity. The latest consequence can be heard in the groaning emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history. There is a festering screwworm outbreak <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/12/new-world-screwworm-infestation-cattle-industry> caused in part by Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID. There is a festering measles outbreak <https://publichealth.jhu.edu/ivac/resources/us-measles-tracker> that is both not being contained by RFK’s gutted CDC, and caused in part by him personally, through his yearslong history of spewing anti-vaccine misinformation <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rfk-jr-s-history-of-medical-misinformation-raises-concerns-over-hhs-nomination/>. Weather forecasts have become notably less accurate due to Trump’s budget cuts grounding half the government’s weather balloons <https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/06/weather-warnings-budget-cuts-00986178> . Republicans have been dreaming of overturning the New Deal ever since it was passed and returning America to an imagined 19th-century utopia with a federal government that barely exists. We’ve got just a small taste of what that would mean today, and the flavor smacks of parasitic protozoan. *https://prospect.org/2026/07/16/how-donald-trump-created-worst-diarrhea-outbreak-cyclosporiasis-food-safety/ <https://prospect.org/2026/07/16/how-donald-trump-created-worst-diarrhea-outbreak-cyclosporiasis-food-safety/>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42507): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42507 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120318130/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
