The war on expertise

Eroding safety margins

You may be wondering why we didn’t cover Trump’s crazy speech last week. I didn’t watch it, and it seems like mainstream sources have done well at debunking Trump’s claims. The speech seems to have even dropped off the Republican radar quickly, but what else should we expect from a Republican presidential address that boiled down to the Democrats can run free and fair elections (2016 and 2024), but Trump can’t (2020). I think Republicans often want to forget that Trump, not Biden, was president in 2020.

Instead, I want to spend a little time on two instances that underscore how the Trump Administration is undermining public safety. Both problems arose within the past few days, but the basis for the problems were laid months ago.

Credit ocial media screenshot

The first example was the Blue Angel low pass in Florida. Over the weekend, video emerged of the Blue Angels flying extremely low and fast over Pensacola Beach, near the home base of the team.

My immediate reaction was that, while this made for cool video, it was extremely dangerous to the crowd. Federal Aviation Regulations prohibit low “buzz jobs” and aerobatics over crowds. Military regulations mirror the civil rules.

Saying this online was like kicking over an anthill. Commenters came out of the woodwork to deny any danger and claim that the team knew exactly what it was doing. These attitudes persisted even after the team leader called the pass “unsafe,” and the pilot of the aircraft in question told a congresswoman that he miscalculated the turn.

The Navy handled this well. The team leader said the team would debrief and correct the problem. Initially, the Navy said it would conduct a safety review of the incident.

It takes courage to admit a mistake, especially one as well-documented as the Pensacola pass. The pilot, the Blue Angels, and the Navy should be commended for handling the problem head-on and honestly.

The Navy’s civilian leadership did not perform as well. Defense Secretary Hegseth and Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao rushed to quash the review before it started, Hegseth tweeting, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.”

The big problem is the climate Hegseth is creating a climate that encourages risky behavior and dismissiveness of safety regulations. This is especially true since the underwhelming concern about the Blue Angels incident follows closely on the heels of other low flying incidents involving Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Tennessee and South Carolina. It seems the only regulations that concern Hegseth involve PT and shaving.

This sort of attitude gets people killed, and both the Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds have had fatal crashes in the past, despite the faith of those who believe they can do no wrong. In fact, invulnerability is one of the five hazardous attitudes pilots are trained to avoid. (The others are anti-authority, impulsivity, macho, and resignation. Of these, four easily apply to Hegseth and the Administration.) Crashes at airshows are not unheard of, which is why aircraft aerobatics are kept a safe distance from the crowd.

The second example of a safety problem is the nationwide cyclospora outbreak of parasitic diarrhea. Under RFK’s leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC decreased monitoring of parasitic foodborne infections and the FDA suspended the Foodnet infection tracking program. Further, there is widespread agreement that the Trump Administration’s cuts left the CDC and FDA unable to manage the crisis effectively.

So far, the government has given mixed messaging on the outbreak. The source of the outbreak was originally traced to lettuce imported from Mexico by Taylor Farms and used at Taco Bell, but now the government says that, even though the test that it performed on the lettuce yielded a false positive, Taylor Farms is still the prime suspect.

Americans are learning the hard way what some of those federal workers in the bloated bureaucracies do. Or did. Prior to DOGE, we may have had a government that was microscopically larger than the one we have today, but it was a government that effectively protected us all but the normal variety of Taco Bell diarrhea.

DOGE enacted massive cuts to the federal workforce, but the government is still spending more than ever. The minuscule savings were squandered on the Iran war and massive explosion of the anti-immigration police state (which has been involved in more bad shootings recently as well as arresting a legal Chinese immigrant who sought asylum after working as a human rights lawyer in the PRC).

Right-wingers thought the government was malevolent before, but under the Trump Administration, we’ve seen the altruistic segments of government eviscerated while the unaccountable (and poorly vetted and trained) police state has grown. The anti-government right has created their worst nightmare, and they don’t realize it.

The common thread between these two incidents is an antipathy to expertise, whether it be the aviation safety experts who make it possible for multimillion dollar fighter jets to fly within inches of either or the medical experts who made sure that our food supplies were not tainted. If you listen to the MAGAs, they’re all a bunch of nerds.

Part of the problem is that our safety protocols are so good that people have forgotten what it’s like to have frequent, devastating crashes or disease outbreaks. The one big recent problem that affected the American people, the COVID-19 pandemic, is not perceived as real by a large number of MAGA supporters.

This line of thinking has taken us to a point where experts doing their jobs are either forced out or ignored. These aren’t the last crises that we will see under the Trump Administration, and all we can do is hope that career military commanders can enforce discipline, the remnants of the scientific corps at HHS can hold the line against microscopic invaders, and that career experts in other agencies can hunker down and be there when we need them.

It will take years to complete the rebuilding of the government agencies that Trump has gutted. The rebuilding can’t even start for another two years, but voters can slow the destruction by electing politicians in November who will hold the Trump Administration accountable.

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