Lambert here:
The Jackpot is like an iceberg, except (at this early date) 99% percent of the posts are underwater, not a mere 90%.
The submerged posts on The Jackpot are over 1000 reports like this one on DOGE, reports that I have collected, excerpted, tagged, organized by date, aggregated into database and made searchable.1. I chose Drupal for The Jackpot because it has this functionality, unlike (say) WordPress. I call this project the DOGE Timeline because it’s organized by date.
DOGE can be seen as an experiment in direct, lawless, authoritarian rule. That’s a bad thing. I hope to be posting on DOGE in more detail shortly, with the DOGE timeline as a (dare I say it) unique research tool (especially important given linkrot). At a minimum, I want the individuals who perpetrated this Constitutional atrocity to be accountable for it for the rest of their lives (hence the “People” tags).
I thought, however, that a DOGE report that involved the hantavirus was timely, and so I front-paged it (normally, reports are not front-paged, which is why you’re not seeing a sidebar with a thousand posts in it).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Program experienced significant layoffs almost exactly one year ago despite record outbreaks at the time, according to a 2025 report from CBS News.
The current hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch ship MV Hondius has sparked fresh questions for many about the sanitation measures that cruise ships must adhere to. While experts believe the current hantavirus outbreak did not originate from a lack of cleanliness on the ship — as passengers are thought to have been infected before joining the cruise — attention is being drawn to the actions cruise companies take to ensure their ships are properly sanitized.
In April 2025, CBS News reported that all full-time employees working for the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program (VSP) had been fired, leaving a smaller group of 12 U.S. Public Health Service officers. The layoffs came amid a “record” number of norovirus outbreaks in the U.S. last year, per the report.
Lambert here: To be fair, I’m not aware of a DOGE staffer embedded in the Vessel Sanitation Program.
Per the CBS News report, the VSP’s epidemiologist, who led the agency’s outbreak response on cruise ships was laid off at the time. Only one epidemiologist remained on the program’s team at the time, however they were in the early stages of training, according to the report. It reportedly takes up to six months for new cruise ships inspectors to be fully trained.
Despite the layoffs last year, a spokesperson for the CDC said the Vessel Sanitation Program remains “fully staffed.”
“CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program (VSP) remains fully staffed, including epidemiologists, and continues to carry out all core program activities for cruise ships under U.S. jurisdiction,” the statement read.
Lambert here: “fully” and “core” are doing a lot of work, there.
NOTE
1 Search will be faster once I get SOLR up and running. I could probably speed up page loading, too, if I were more clever about CSS.