US President Donald Trump’s administration is attempting to rehire officials with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) who worked on the government response to bird flu before being fired over the weekend, US media report.
The layoffs were part of a cost-cutting mission across the US government by Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) leader Elon Musk.
The terminations came as the latest outbreak of the bird flu has wreaked havoc on poultry and cattle farms, causing egg prices to skyrocket and raising concerns among public health experts.
A USDA spokesperson told the BBC that although “several” officials working on bird flu were “notified of their terminations” over the weekend, “we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters”.
“USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and we are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfil our statutory mission,” the spokesperson added.
Bird flu has circulated among American poultry flocks for years, but the virus found a new foothold in the US last year when it began to infect dairy cows.
Since then, dozens of humans in close contact with the animals have been infected as well, including a Louisiana patient who was the first to die from the virus in the US last month.
At the same time, the outbreak has worsened on poultry farms, forcing farmers to cull their chickens, leading to egg shortages and high prices.
Earlier this week, the US reached an agreement to buy 15,000 tonnes of liquid egg from Turkey to help plug the shortage, a Turkish trade official told the BBC.
Ibrahim Afyon, the president of the Egg Producers Central Union in Turkey, said the egg products would be sent to the US in two batches by the end of June.
Trump launched his mass cost-cutting programme in an effort to weed out what he sees as taxpayers’ money being wasted. Polling suggests cutting government spending has widespread support.
But the USDA firings are not the first time the administration has attempted to rehire federal employees within days of laying them off.
After firing officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration last week, US media reported that the government was trying to reinstate some of those employees, but was struggling to get in contact with them.
The layoffs were in addition to an estimated 75,000 workers who have accepted buyout offers from the White House to leave voluntarily.
Several Democratic states have filed lawsuits attempting to block some of these mass government layoffs as well as the newly formed Doge’s access to sensitive data.
But in a victory for Trump and Musk, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected one of these requests on Tuesday, arguing Democratic states had failed to link Trump’s layoffs to “imminent harm” in their states.
Trump and Musk appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night to defend the mass cuts they are making across the government, with Musk claiming Doge is just trying to “restore the will of the people through the president”.
“What we’re finding is that there’s an unelected bureaucracy,” he said.
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