A quote-unquote pause in all federal funds, a gag order on the federal health agencies and a line in the sand for federal workers.

We're really doing this, I guess.

This is America Dissected.

I'm your host, Dr. Abdu L. Seid.

And I'm your co-host, Dr. Caitlin Jettelina.

Caitlin, what a week, and I feel like we're going to keep saying that for a while.

Stepping back, like, what is the mood music in your mind right now?

Oh, mute music?

I don't even have time for mood music.

I don't know. It's exhausting. It's depressing. It's deflating. It's a little bit chaotic. I don't know. There must be a jazz combo of all of those things.

It's like some of this experimental jazz where they just break everything and you're left being like, okay, what was that? Yeah. How about you? Yeah, not great. I, um, I woke up this morning to

find that upwards of like a third of our public health budget was downstream of federal funds

that had just been frozen and had multiple conversations

with coworkers and tears about whether or not they'd still have jobs. And, you know, this is the

hard part about it, is that you have an administration, I think it's easy to say that they don't

appreciate the downstream consequences of what they're doing. I think they actually decidedly do.

And I think they're doing

this because they know it wreaks havoc, because they know it interrupts the system, and because

they know that it frustrates and angers and saddens and overwhelms people who care about this

stuff like we do. And so here we are. It's just really, really devastating.

Yeah, I mean, Russ Vaught, right, the key architect to a lot of these phrases,

said plainly during his confirmation that I want people to feel the pain. And that is what

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