Yesterday I broke the news that the CDC has indefinitely shuttered the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), a comprehensive federal data collection program “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” which has been in operation since 1988. CDC ordered a halt to collection of 2024 data effective January 31st of this year and put the entire 2025 program on indefinite hold.

This matches of course with the general HHS-wide crackdown on public health and research. But it still wasn’t clear precisely why the program had been shuttered or whether it might ever come back. Based on my sources, I can now report that the issue does not appear to be the various ways that comprehensive research on pregnancy might be perceived as bumping up against controversies over abortion and other politicized issues of reproductive health care. The issue is what the administration calls “DEI.” The questionnaires include questions about racism, discrimination, sexual orientation and identity, and an array of questions which look at how socioeconomic status can affect health. Some but not all of those question were new as of 2023 and basically all of them have to go.

We’ve got a fascinating story unfolding with the new Musk email I reported on below. And yes, something can be fascinating while also being grave, dangerous and in its own way terrifying. Over the course of the evening top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) and other parts of the government have explicitly instructed employees in their departments and agencies to ignore the email. Meanwhile the DOJ seems to be instructing its employees to follow it. (And yes, FBI is sort of under DOJ and that’s kind of weird but that’s where we are.)

A short time ago Elon Musk posted this to Twitter.

I have now seen three separate copies of this email sent to federal employees in three separate federal agencies/departments. They’re all identical. In one of those cases it is to an agency where all but a literal handful of employees have been under a stop work order for more than a week. The emails have the subject line “What did you do last week?” followed by an urgent-response red emoji exclamation point.

The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” in the words of the program’s website. It has run continuously since 1988 and covers everything from the particulars of newborn health and morbidity to issues like post-partum depression in mothers. I can report that the Trump CDC has shuttered the program as part of its general clampdown on medical research and public health information.

In Oregon’s 2nd district, Rep. Cliff Bentz (R) got a rude awakening in four town halls he held in this past week. At one point in his town hall in La Grande he chided the audience, saying a lot of representatives had refused to even hold town halls. So they should be grateful he decided to show up.

Note that this is an R+15 district — basically the eastern two-thirds of the state.

From the La Grande Observer …