What did Donald Trump do today?

He crippled a lot of federal agencies dealing with Americans' health.

Trump—or those acting on his authority—has been systematically firing federal workers by the thousands during the past week. Most of the workers targeted are "probationary" workers, who have not worked in their current position for the required 2-3 years needed to gain civil service protection. That means they can be fired at a whim without severance, even if they uprooted their lives to take a job that had been offered in good faith.

However, in many cases, these are not new hires—experienced federal employees also take probationary status when they are promoted or switch departments, and they have been targeted by these purges too. Military veterans, in particular, are heavily represented in this class of federal employees.

Several of the agencies targeted today are charged with keeping Americans healthy and safe from disease outbreaks. Employees, postdoctoral fellows, and students at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the branch of the CDC that trains public health officials to fight infectious disease outbreaks, were told to expect their firing today. Experts call the program the "crown jewel" of the world defense against outbreaks of diseases like ebola, dengue fever, and biowarfare threats like anthrax or smallpox. The CDC as a whole is losing approximately 1,300 workers, and the National Institutes for Health about 1,500. That includes 300 workers at the National Cancer Institute. Those numbers do not include the nearly 1,000 physicians and health care workers of the Indian Health Service who were fired today. Those workers form the backbone of health services for many Native American tribal communities. The United States has treaty obligations that require it to provide that medical care.

Trump campaigned on a promise to "come up with the cure" for cancer if he were re-elected.

The federal workforce did add a few "new" employees today, though. The Department of Energy fired several hundred nuclear experts at the National Nuclear Safety Administration yesterday, only to scramble to try to hire them back today. Trump—or whoever is acting in his name—didn't realize that work requiring expertise in nuclear engineering and a security clearance to deal with the secrets of the United States' nuclear arsenal couldn't simply be shuffled onto the remaining staff. 

It's not clear how many of the fired NNSA workers have agreed to come back, or on what terms.

Why does this matter?

• If your plan to make government more efficient is exactly what an enemy saboteur would do if they could, it's a bad plan.

• Government needs the people whose job it is to tell elected officials how to fight disease outbreaks with something more effective than drinking bleach.

• No president should ever do anything that makes health care or disease prevention harder to get and more expensive for Americans.

• Even by Trump standards, firing the people who keep the nation's nuclear arsenal safe and ready with no plan to replace them is boneheaded.