The biggest news of the day should once again be about DOGE.
A new Executive Order was passed a few minutes ago.
It empowers DOGE to spearhead the complete reorganization of the federal governmentđź§µ
The first part of this Order is simple:
The OMB will put out a plan to make the federal workforce smaller and more efficient, including a stipulation that agencies must remove four existing employees for each new hire, with some exceptions.
The second part is meatier.
New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.
But that's not even the big part yet.
Third, agency heads will prepare for a massive reduction in the federal workforce.
This workforce reduction will apply to employees not performing necessary and statutorily mandated functions, so if Congress isn't protecting your job, you're likely leaving.
Fourth, suitability judgments about the excepted service will be expanded.
People who do not meet certain legal obligations, people who do not certify NDA compliance, and people who steal or misuse government resources are deemed no longer suitable for employment in it.
Here's the really big part of this order. It's kind of buried down deep, but it's very important:
Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections, and offices to consolidate.
Putting this all together, what the Order entails is a massive reorganization of the federal workforce and the streamlining of the civil service to make its operation line up with the goals of DOGE.
Not only that, but it empowers DOGE by embedding Team Leads for oversight.
Couple this with the February 4 OPM memo on CIOs, and what we have is staggering:
The federal government will be centralized, stripped down, and more intimately controlled by the President and his delegates, with control enhanced via DOGE.
This is the biggest news of the day, and it's hard to overstate just how big it is.
Because the federal government has grown so unwieldy that no one can provide you with a semblance of an outline of it, measures like this may just be needed to tame the beast.
In my latest article, I documented that the only RCT for functional medicine methods appears fraudulentđź§µ
Before getting into it, what's functional medicine?
It's a pseudoscience used to bilk patients by getting them on an unending cycle of tests, supplements, and more tests.
Functional medicine's practitioners claim that they can reveal and treat so-called "root causes" of people's health problems
These are proposed to be things like gut health, toxin burdens, and various chemical and hormonal imbalances
They find these things with unproven tests
If you run enough tests, you will be able to find something that looks 'off' about a patient, and if you're a functional medicine doctor, that's your 'A-ha!' moment, even if—as is usually the case—the result is just a false-positive and treating it is unlikely to do anything.
If you want to add beds to a hospital, build facilities, purchase diagnostic scanners, but you live somewhere with CON laws, then you have to prove you're not creating competition for other medical facilities in the area, which is often the whole state.
No. Competition. Allowed.
The idea behind these laws is that people will spend excessively on healthcare, so to combat that, we'll have people report if there's more spending needed before approving it.
Nutrition science is the area of science that's suffered the most in the replication crisis. It is a graveyard of theories and pseudoscientific bullshit.
Now:
The HHS is going to make doctors to sit through 40 hours of classes where they'll have to take that bullshit seriously.
This reads like a list of the things that fared the worst in all of nutrition science and stuff with NO EVIDENCE.
When I read through this, my mouth was agape.
Whoever wrote this trash needs fired for incompetence. Mentally retarded people should not hold keep government posts.
'What did you learn in your mandatory nutrition misinformation class?'
'Well, if a patient comes in with a migraine, I'm supposed to sell them a WHOOP bracelet or an Oura ring so I can help them figure out their health age.'
Strength training is a highly effective way to improve your flexibility, and I've made a graphic to put this into understandable terms:
This is from a meta-analysis of strength training trials.
What makes that so useful is that there's major publication bias for strength outcomes (pictured).
But, since authors weren't looking at it, there's no publication bias for flexibility outcomes.
Studies made their way into this meta-analysis because they had a flexibility outcome, but they made their way into the literature because they showed positive strength results.
This could indirectly biased the flexibility results because of selection on a correlated outcome.