The clock is ticking for federal health employees.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—a highly consequential umbrella agency that employees more than 80,000 people across the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and several other offices—has given staff a deadline of tomorrow to express interest in taking a buyout of up to $25,000, pre-tax, as part of the broader purge of federal workers. One of my latest stories, based on interviews with several HHS employees as well as internal emails I obtained, reports on the quandary facing federal health workers. They could leave jobs that they love to escape the chaos President Trump, Elon Musk, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have unleashed, or stay and try to fight for public health. Meanwhile, officials seem hellbent on undermining them and imposing burdensome working conditions.
Those efforts have included ending or limiting funding for research on vaccine hesitancy, studying disproven potential connections between vaccine and autism, and forcing employees to spend hours complying with Trump's anti-transgender and anti-DEI executive orders. "I had two grant applications where I had to tell people, 'you need to go back and take up every single reference to DEI in this application because we can’t fund it,'" a worker in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), an agency that oversees child welfare programs, told me. Recently, the worker—who plans to take the buyout—spent four hours combing through hundreds of pages of documents to eliminate DEI-related language. "It’s insulting," she said. "They’re just trying to push people out."
That's part of the challenge for HHS employees: If they don't take the buyout, they worry they could be fired anyway, given that today is also the deadline for agency heads to come up with "reorganization plans" to implement "large-scale reductions in force," based on one of Trump’s executive orders, according to the Office of Personnel Management. A CDC researcher who studies infectious diseases and plans to reject the buyout summed it up best. "I hope I do not get let go," she said, "but if I do, I don’t worry about myself as much as I worry about who will do the work if we are gone."
Check out the full story to hear more from her and others about what's happening inside HHS and its implications for public health.
Employees are grappling with buyout offers as public health crises mount. “Somebody has to stay to help clean up the mess that they’re most likely going to make,” one said.
BY JULIANNE MCSHANE
On Monday night, a longtime employee of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sat down with his wife at their kitchen table in a D.C. suburb and decided to leave the job he loves.
Three days earlier, he was one of thousands of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who received an email offering them up to $25,000, pre-tax, to leave their jobs. Initially, the NIH employee, who analyzes how grants are spent, was not sure he’d take it. The deadline is this Friday at 5 pm, which gives workers only a week to decide whether or not to leave jobs that many have been in for decades. (HHS officials make the final decisions about who gets approved for the buyouts based on who says they want them, according to the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM.)
But over the weekend, the NIH employee considered the toll the past six weeks since President Trump’s inauguration—especially the antics of unelected billionaireElon Musk—had taken on his mental and physical health and his productivity at work. By Monday, he had made up his mind: “I’m out,” he said.
He and his wife had crunched the numbers and determined they had enough retirement savings—plus from her higher salary—to get by. (He and the other HHS employees Mother Jones spoke to for this story are being granted anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out.)
“I just can’t take the hostile work environment and what this administration is doing to our country and to public health in general,” he told me. “I can’t, in good conscience, serve this administration any longer.”
He also worries about what a mass exodus of employees from the agency, either voluntarily due to the buyouts or forcibly as a result of more layoffs, could mean for public health. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an unqualified anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, is now running the agency. “I absolutely feel like I’m making [this decision] under duress—we’re not being given enough time to think about it,” the NIH worker said. “I didn’t want to leave under these circumstances.”
I spoke with five HHS workers over the past two days who are eligible for the buyouts, three of whom said they plan to try to take it. Two others said they will stay in their jobs. Each one characterizes the choice as a daunting one: Leave and lose income and abandon critical work, or stay and try to continue to make a difference in public health as officials at the highest levels of government seem hellbent on undermining them and imposing burdensome working conditions.
“Somebody has to stay to help clean up the mess that they’re most likely going to make,” a public health advisor on infectious diseases at the CDC told me. “If you want to get rid of me, you’re basically going to drag me kicking and screaming out of here.”
Spokespeople for HHS did not respond to ten detailed questions from Mother Jones on Thursday.
The buyouts are the latest efforts to scale back the workforce at HHS, a massive and highly consequential umbrella agency that employs more than 80,000 people.
Last week, eligible HHS employees were also offered early retirement buyouts under a separate program also managed by OPM, according to an email sent to staff. HHS also reportedly lost 5,200 probationary employees following the purge of those workers across the federal government. The agency has since reportedly rehired some. An unknown amount also resigned from HHS following the January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months of pay if they resign. It is not immediately clear how many workers at HHS had accepted the latest buyouts. But on Tuesday, HHS seemed to try to entice more workers to do so, by offering employees eight weeks of full pay and benefits in addition to the lump sum, according to a copy of an email to staff reviewed by Mother Jones.
HHS is not alone in trying to lead staff to the door. The Education Department and the Social Security Administration are among those that have also reportedly offered workers the same buyouts HHS workers were offered. And more layoffs will soon hit the entire government, given that Thursday is the deadline for agency heads to come up with “reorganization plans” to implement “large-scale reductions in force,” based on one of Trump’s executive orders, according to OPM.
RFK Jr. has been tight-lipped about which HHS workers will be on the chopping block, saying on Fox last month that he has a “list in my head” of who he wants to go; he also previously said he would fire and replace 600 NIH workers on day one of a second Trump term, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote—though that has not happened yet.
Experts say the impacts of losing thousands more HHS workers could be broadly felt by Americans given the agency’s vast mandate. For some, this is motivation to stay and fight. “Health security is at risk,” said a CDC researcher who studies infectious diseases and plans to reject the buyout. “We had enough problems keeping up during COVID, just having enough employees to be part of the response.”
She and the other CDC researcher pointed to the fact that the CDC is monitoring more than 220 measles cases in Texas and New Mexico, which have led to two deaths so far—including of an unvaccinated child. (RFK wrote in an op-ed for Fox earlier this month about the importance of the measles vaccine—but also characterized vaccination as a “personal” choice. As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote, he has also promoted unproven measles remedies such as steroids and cod liver oil.) Officials are also tracking the bird flu, of which there are 70 cases and one death so far. And influenza, or the flu, has also been surging this season—at the same time that the meeting of the FDA’s flu vaccine panel, to determine the composition of the next flu shot, has been canceled.
Employees working on vaccine-related research are also concerned that their work could be impacted by RFK Jr.’s opposition to it. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the NIH is terminating or limiting more than 40 grants related to researching vaccine hesitancy. On Sunday, Reuters reported that the CDC is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, despite the fact that theories of such links have been disproven. (As of Tuesday afternoon, the CDC website—last updated in December—still noted that.)
The NIH worker who is taking the buyout said those directives are prime examples of why he is leaving. For those who stay at HHS, he predicts “there’s going to be a lot of people forced to do things that go against their personal sense of morality.”
That has already been the case since Trump took office. Several HHS employees say they had to reluctantly carry out his executive orders targeting transgender peopleand diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across government. “I had two grant applications where I had to tell people, ‘you need to go back and take up every single reference to DEI in this application, because we can’t fund it,’” said a worker in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), an agency that oversees child welfare, including programs such as Head Start and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Another day recently, the worker—who plans to take the buyout—spent four hours combing through hundreds of pages of documents to eliminate DEI-related language. “It’s insulting,” she said. “They’re just trying to push people out.”
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, senior advisor to the president, on the South Lawn of the White House in March.Samuel Corum/Pool/Cnp/CNP/Zuma
For some, it’s working. A scientific review officer at NIH, who oversees grant applications and plans to take the buyout, recounted “realizing that things that you hold important are no longer valued and are actually demonized” when she was told to remove her pronouns from her email signature and that grant reviewers should ignore parts of applications focused on diversity to comply with the anti-DEI orders. “The things that brought me to public health years ago,” she told me, “are not the things that are being prioritized, if we’re not allowed to be looking at how we create an equitable environment for everybody.”
While lofty ideals may motivate some federal workers’ decisions on the buyouts, practicalities also matter. A sticking point for the scientific research officer is the mandated return-to-office policy, as dictated by one of the executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office.
Some HHS employees reportedly had to return to the office last month, while others—those who live within 50 miles of an HHS office—have to return Monday. Those who live outside the 50-mile radius have been ordered to work from any federal office starting next month.
“Where do we sit? How do we buy things?” one of the CDC researchers asked, noting that offices may not be equipped for an influx of staff from other agencies. There’s also the $1 spending limit imposed by DOGE, which staff worry could prevent them from buying basic office supplies. “It’s hard to function on a day-to-day basis without some assurance that the resources and assets that you might need to do your job are readily available,” the other CDC employee said.
The return-to-office mandate comes at the same time that the administration has curtailed work-related travel. Internal emails that are first being reported by Mother Jones confirm the NIH cancelled its plan to send some National Cancer Institute (NCI) employees to an annual conference, put on by the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), in Chicago in late April, despite it being the only federal office dedicated to researching cancer. The email does not provide a reason why NCI will not exhibit at the conference this year, only saying it’s “in light of current guidance.” An AACR spokesperson said the decision is believed to be due to a travel ban in place at the agency.
An employee of NCI, who was supposed to attend and is not eligible for the buyouts, called the AACR conference “one of the most important cancer research meetings.” Not having a larger presence there, she added, ultimately limits NCI’s reach. The internal NIH email more or less acknowledges this: “We recognize the valuable opportunity that our exhibit booth provides to engage with grantees and the broader research community,” it says, “so we will continue to search for alternative ways to connect and engage with these audiences.” It also says some NCI staff will still be able to attend the conference in-person or virtually, but only to present at sessions on NCI funding opportunities—as long as the content complies with Trump’s executive orders.
Taking the buyout brings its own set of uncertainties and frustrations.
Both NIH employees who plan to leave said they are not sure what they will do next. “This wasn’t my career plan—I came to the NIH thinking I’d be able to grow within this agency and do good,” the scientific review officer said. One thing she cannot easily do anytime soon is return to the federal government: If employees who take the buyout resume working for the federal government within five years, they have to pay it back.
A small consolation, though, is that the agency she is leaving does not feel like the same one she joined. “Given that we’re not funding so much important science at this point,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine the work you do is going to matter anyway.”
Meanwhile, those who are rejecting the buyouts on principle are bracing for the fact that they could wind up being fired anyway. “I hope I do not get let go,” one of the CDC researchers said, “but if I do, I don’t worry about myself as much as I worry about who will do the work if we are gone.”
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Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil (C) talks to the press during a briefing organized by Pro-Palestinian protesters who set up a new encampment at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus on June 01, 2024.Mother Jones; Selcuk Acar/Anadolu/Getty
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Early this week, as Columbia students scrambled to respond to the United States government’s arrest of recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a series of logistical hurdles emerged. What would the protesters do if approached by police? What did the fine print of Columbia’s recently-updated public events policy say? What should the group tell the media?
As one student told me, there was a grim humor amid the discussion. “Shit,” they thought each time an obstacle came up, “Mahmoud would’ve known what to do.”
Khalil, according to the many student protesters I spoke with, was an anchor for the movement, though he reportedly did not participate directly in the Columbia encampment. Rather, he was a spokesperson and a mediator: as the group navigated a tumultuous spring of protest, Khalil always seemed to know how to move forward calmly under pressure. Politicians and outsiders have painted a different—and more sinister—picture of Khalil, who is Palestinian, labeling him as “aligned” with terrorists and in need of deportation.
On the evening of March 8th, plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers—including one who was given a shoutout at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, as Drop Site News reported—stopped Khalil outside his home, detained him in front of his eight-months-pregnant wife, and, without presenting a warrant, took him away. In legal filings, Khalil’s lawyers said his wife was not told where her husband would be taken.
Federal agents told him they were there to revoke his student visa, according to his lawyers. When Khalil told the officers he is a legal permanent resident with a green card, they told him they would revoke that instead.
“My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it’s shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people,” Khalil’s wife said in a statement delivered Wednesday. “His disappearance has devastated our lives—every day without him is filled with uncertainty, not just for me but for our entire family and community.”
At noon on Tuesday, March 11th, Columbia students and faculty staged a sit-in on the Low Library steps, demanding that ICE leave Columbia’s campus and return their friend. Within ten minutes, public safety officers had the area fenced off, as helicopters hovered overhead. It was a different campus from one year ago: nearly every green space was fenced-in, and almost no outsiders were allowed through Columbia’s gates.
At the protest, a student named Carly—a classmate of Khalil’s from Columbia’s School of International and Professional Studies—said the detained graduate’s friends know him as someone who wants to help others, even when that means making himself a target.
“He has really gone above and beyond to protect his peers and protect those around him in a way that has even directly harmed him,” Carly said. During last spring’s protests, “when Columbia University admin threatened student safety, Mahmoud served as a mitigator to protect students, which also made him more directly targeted.”
Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, has known Khalil for a year. The professor had grown to rely on Khalil, he said. “Throughout the year, I came to realize that Mahmoud is someone you can always count on to get a straight answer and to talk you through a difficult situation,” Howley said. “Last year, anytime I had a question about what someone was doing or concerns about something in the protest movement and wanted to get some facts checked, I could always call Mahmoud and get a straight answer.”
Carly—who wore a Magen David necklace and a large heart-shaped necklace with the word “Palestine”—said that as a Jewish Columbia student, she felt her supposed “safety” was being used as a pretext for arresting her friend.
The evening that Mahmoud was taken from his university-owned apartment, Carly said, she was messaging back and forth with him about how to keep other students safe from deportation threats. “The night of his detainment, there was a call to action among students, about how we can help with this threat from ICE,” she remembered. “Mahmoud was one of the first people to respond and ask, ‘How can I help?’” Hours later, he was arrested.
These descriptions of Khalil stand in stark contrast to how politicians have spoken of him. President Donald Trump took credit for the arrest. His administration has promised “many more to come.” Border czar Tom Homan called Khalil a “national security threat,” and asserted that he violated free speech “limits.” Homan said on Fox News that they were “absolutely” allowed to deport Khalil.
Even Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), in condemning Khalil’s arrest, still made time to equivocate by prefacing his statement by declaring “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports” (though the Senator did not say what those opinions might be). House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), similarly, asserted that Khalil “created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others” before calling on DHS to stop his deportation.
For Schumer and Jeffries, Khalil’s first-amendment rights are seemingly limited by the alleged content of his speech. But, they say, deportation is out of line. For Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who said “this is not about free speech”—Khalil is an example of the coming crackdown and reminiscent of the War on Terror limits of political thought. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” an unnamed White House official told Bari Weiss’ Free Press. but that Khalil “is a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”
Reporting in The Forwardsuggests that the Trump administration may have obtained his name via a targeted campaign on social media by pro-Israel doxxing groups like Betar and Canary Mission—and that Columbia, as the owner of the property Khalil lives on, did not stop DHS agents from entering. (Columbia has released a statement saying that they did not “request” the presence of ICE agents on campus, and that agents “must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public university buildings.”)
On Wednesday morning, Khalil’s attorney Diala Shamas said outside a Manhattan courthouse that the legal team was unable even to get a call with their client. “A phone call with his lawyers is the bare minimum, and it’s what we need to do…to simply be able to file the papers we need to file to get him back,” Shamas said.
New York federal judge Jesse Furman said he would order the government to allow Khalil’s lawyers to speak with him once on Wednesday, and once on Thursday. So far, despite his lawyers’ hopes, Khalil remains in Louisiana, where he was sent to a GEO Group facility that has reports of previous human rights abuses.
“Fundamentally everything that’s happening to Mahmoud is because of his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” Shamas said. Documents obtained by the Washington Post show that the specific provision the US government is trying to invoke against Khalil requires Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s personal assertion that ““the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
“The government is invoking this very rarely used provision of the immigration and nationality act that they claim allows them to deport people simply because of their political opinions,” Shamas said.
Khalil’s Columbia classmates disbanded their sit-in after five hours. That same evening, another large protest marched through Manhattan in support of Khalil. And the following morning, he appeared in court. He had still not been accused of any crime.
At a briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said this was just the beginning. Khalil, she said, was present while “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers” were distributed (which is not a crime) and suggested that the Department of Homeland Security is in possession of a list of further Columbia students to deport.
Columbia University, when asked for comment on his case, still has not responded.
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Donald Trump’s administrationis to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.
The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a Supreme Court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.
Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics.”
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas.”
Zeldin wrote that Wednesday was the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history” and that “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” He boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission was to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
Environmentalists reacted with horror to the announcement and vowed to defend the overwhelming findings of science and the US’s ability to address the climate crisis through the courts, which regularly struck down Trump’s rollbacks in his first term.
“The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “Come hell or high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives. This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”
In all, the EPA issued 31 announcements within just a few hours that take aim at almost every major environmental rule designed to protect Americans’ clean air and water, as well as a livable climate.
The barrage included a move to overturn a Biden-era plan to slash pollution spewing from coal-fired power plants, which itself was a reduced version of an Obama administration initiative that was struck down by the Supreme Court.
The EPA will also revisit pollution standards for cars and trucks, which Zeldin said had imposed a “crushing regulatory regime” upon auto companies that are now shifting towards electric vehicles; considering weakening rules limiting sooty air pollution that is linked to an array of health problems; potentially axing requirements that power plants not befoul waterways or dump their toxic waste; and considering further narrowing how it implements the Clean Water Act in general.
The stunning broadside of actions against pollution rules could, if upheld by the courts, reshape Americans’ environment in ways not seen since major legislation was passed in the 1970s to end an era of smoggy skies and burning rivers that became the norm following American industrialization.
Pollutants from power plants, highways and industry cause a range of heart, lung and other health problems, with greenhouse gases among this pollution driving up the global temperature and fueling catastrophic heatwaves, floods, storms and other impacts.
“Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution,” said Dominique Browning, director of the Moms Clean Air Force. “This is unacceptable. And shameful. We will oppose with all our hearts to protect our children from this cruel, monstrous action.”
The EPA’s moves come shortly after its decision to shutter all its offices that deal with addressing the disproportionate burden of pollution faced by poor people and minorities in the US, amid a mass firing of agency staff. Zeldin has also instructed that $20 billion in grants to help address the climate crisis be halted, citing potential fraud. Democrats have questioned whether these moves are legal.
Former EPA staff have reacted with shock to the upending of the agency.
“Today marks the most disastrous day in EPA history,” said Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Obama. “Rolling these rules back is not just a disgrace, it’s a threat to all of us. The agency has fully abdicated its mission to protect Americans’ health and wellbeing.”
The Trump administration has promised additional environmental rollbacks in the coming weeks. The Energy Dominance Council that the president established last month is looking to eliminate a vast array of regulations in an effort to boost the fossil fuel industry, the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told the oil and gas conference CeraWeek in Houston on Wednesday. “We will come up with the ways that we can cut red tape,” he said. “We can easily get rid of 20-30 percent of our regulations.”
Our friend and colleague Kevin Drum passed away on March 7. He was 66 and had been living with multiple myeloma for 11 years, and being the extraordinary journalist he was, he had taken readers along on the journey, sharing health updates on his blog. They were, in trademark style, matter-of-fact, data-driven, and wry; the last one included, like so many of his posts, a chart he’d made (this one to track the status of his C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation). There were 140 replies, many from readers who had followed him for years and decades. They worried for him, wished him a speedy recovery, and one wrote:
If, however, it is “time” I wish for YOU the same thing that my Dad wished for my Mom. May your journey be pain free, and your memories clear! You have brought more joy to others than you received. Nothing in this life on earth is better than going when it’s your time, with the knowledge that you brought to others joy, and happiness.
This was quite in line with Kevin’s own thinking about death and dying. In 2016, two years after he was first diagnosed, he wrote an in-depth piece about the death with dignity movement. It had in-depth reporting, but he also grappled with the decisions he would have to make. He wasn’t sure how much longer he might have—“Five years? Ten years? Two?”—but he was very clear that when the time came, he wanted the option of going out on his own terms.
It was an extraordinary piece of writing and like any great piece, it was also a gift to the rest of us, helping make sense of something messy, scary, and confusing. That was Kevin’s talent, from the moment he first started posting as Calpundit as a pioneer of the blogosphere, later blogging at Washington Monthly under the sobriquet of Political Animal. His sweet spot was making complicated political and economic topics accessible to the rest of us, and by the time we took the helm of Mother Jones in 2006, he was one of our favorite bloggers. (Who couldn’t love the inventor of Friday cat blogging?) We asked him if he’d write for the magazine, and then whether he would consider bringing his blogging over to MoJo, and, by 2008, he’d agreed to both.
That began a 13-year run during which, it’s no exaggeration to say, Kevin was a big part of turning Mother Jones into a force to be reckoned with. When he went long, he went big: He wrote a groundbreaking piece on the link between lead exposure and crime rates that helped advance the conversation about environmental racism. Long before most people were paying attention, he explained how the destruction of unions was bad for the whole middle class and how AI was going to take all of our jobs. He unpacked the aftermath of the housing crisis and bank bailout. He told his mostly liberal audience that earmarks were good, actually. Meanwhile, producing posts at a breathtaking clip, his blog routinely reached hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions, a month. His most loyal readers were a fierce community who debated the finer points of this or that feat of statistical analysis, laughed with him at the antics of the pompous and entitled, and cooed over the cat photos he faithfully posted every Friday.
Like every blogger worth his salt, he sometimes shot from the hip and occasionally missed; unlike some, he had the courage and integrity to take the resulting flack, listen, and change his mind. And true to his menschy self, he turned down every proposed increase to his modest salary, asking that we use the money to help more junior staffers instead.
No matter the topic or format, Kevin loved busting myths, puncturing truisms, and perhaps most of all, helping all of us see that regardless of how bizarre, unnerving, or terrifying things got, the end of the world was not yet nigh. On hearing of Kevin’s passing, our former colleague Dave Gilson, a fellow chart genius who often worked with Kevin, sent us a note that read, “Kevin was passionate and principled, but his default setting was calm in the face of hyperventilation and hyperbole. So when he did get angry, you knew it was bad.”
When Kevin first had to undergo cancer therapy that took him out of commission for a time, he worried about abandoning his readers. Other staffers helped fill in, but we also reached out to the OG blogging community, to see if they had a post to offer in honor of him. A veritable who’s-who—Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Ann Friedman, Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Chait, David Dayen, Felix Salmon, and many others—signed up. Over the next few years, his health ebbed and flowed but eventually got to a point where he decided he had to blog at his own pace and timing. He eschewed Substack—didn’t like the vibe—and set up his own blog, naming it Jabberwocking. And he spent the next few months working on a long piece for us about how Fox News had made America so angry.
Donald Trump did make Kevin angry, but even in the chaotic weeks of the second Trump administration, he found ways to knock the chaos-mongers down a notch. He had a realist’s idealism—a cautious, but steadfast faith in the ability of democracy to muddle through its darkest hours and come out the other side. In these last ten years, that was unique and sanity-preserving for so many of his readers, us included.
A few weeks ago, when he was in the hospital struggling with pneumonia, Kevin had a low point and posted a brief update that ended with the words “Take care of Donald Trump for me.” It was a little cryptic, but also classic Kevin: He didn’t want us to take ourselves, or Trump, too seriously. He knew that this, too, would pass.
Kevin was a passionate amateur photographer and loved to post about some new thing he’d accomplished with a lens, or an evening he’d spent outdoors trying to capture some moment in the skies. He set up Jabberwocking so as to display one of his photos every time you reloaded it, along with a quote from some writer or blogger. When we checked it after learning of his death, it showed a photo of the Santa Ana Mountains, shot from Irvine in Orange County, California, where he spent his entire life. The quote that accompanied it was “Everything takes longer than you think,” and it was from Kevin himself. We’d like to think it was a reminder: these tough, confusing times will be hard, and will last longer than we’d like, but not forever.
Kevin’s wife Marian has set up a remembrance page on Facebook and we encourage his fans to leave their goodbyes there.
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