Since my Internet Archive indexes of both CDC.gov and FDA.gov seem to have gotten a lot of positive responses, I'm following up by tackling a much larger federal healthcare department website: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Unlike the FDA's website, which has around ~5,800 public-facing pages, or the CDC's site which has ~7,200, CMS.gov has a whopping ~75,000 pages.
Needless to say, it's going to take some time to index them all, so bear with me.
No, I don't plan on posting every press release issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the Musk/Trump Regime any more than I did under previous adminstrations, but this one attempts to directly address the single biggest Constitutional crisis going on at this very moment.
CMS has two senior Agency veterans – one focused on policy and one focused on operations – who are leading the collaboration with DOGE, including ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems and technology. We are taking a thoughtful approach to see where there may be opportunities for more effective and efficient use of resources in line with meeting the goals of President Trump.
Earlier this week I gained a lot of attention for generating (with the help of others) an index of the entire CDC.gov website, with direct links to all ~7,200 pages archived by the Internet Archive on or before 1/27/25.
At the time, I was scrambling to slap together something in light of the news that the Musk/Trump Regime had begun purging thousands of pages of critical public health information from federal websites, so I wasn't very sophisticated about how I did it: I simply broke all ~7,200 links into chunks of 500 apiece and pasted them into 15 pages.
A few days later we did something similar with FDA.gov, except this time I took the time to set it up with a drop-down menu with each page covering a different major topic.
At least...as far as I know...the links are from on or shortly before January 27, 2025. It's possible that they were already tinkering with and/or deleting pages/data prior to then.
I've significantly improved the interface for the FDA links: Instead of simply lumping all the links together, 500 to a page the way I did for the CDC, this time I've broken all of the links out into major topics as well as creating a drop-down menu for the topics to make it easier to navigate.
The White House is working on an executive order to fire thousands of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services workers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under the order, the Food and Drug Administration,Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies would have to cut a certain percentage of employees.
...The agencies are responsible for a range of functions, from approving new drugs to tracing bird-flu outbreaks and researching cancer. A loss of staff could affect the efforts depending on which workers are cut and whether they are concentrated in particular areas.
...Agency officials have been told to prepare lists of probationary workers who have essential roles and must be retained, and of employees who don’t, according to people familiar with the instructions.
Federal employees must decide today whether to take the administration’s buyout offer. More than 40,000 federal workers to date have said they would resign under the deal.
(Yes, I'm aware Elon Musk is a naturalized citizen, but given the Musk/Trump Administration's obsession with demonizing immigrants it seems like an appropriate headline)
Representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been working at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where they have gotten access to key payment and contracting systems, according to people familiar with the matter.
The DOGE representatives have been on site at the agency’s offices this week, the people said, and they are looking at the systems’ technology as well as the spending that flows through them, with a focus on pinpointing what they consider fraud or waste. DOGE representatives are also examining the agency’s organizational design and how it is staffed, the people added.
