Big Balls Made a Boo Boo
By 
The Food and Drug Administration earlier this month fired dozens of staffers responsible for going after retailers who illegally sell tobacco to minors.
Now it’s begging them to come back.
Senior FDA officials asked laid-off employees in recent days to temporarily return after mass cuts decimated the agency’s ability to penalize retailers that sell cigarettes and vapes to minors, four federal health officials familiar with the matter said.
The scramble followed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s termination of roughly 10,000 employees, which included everyone in the FDA office charged with preparing and seeking fines against stores that repeatedly violate a ban on selling tobacco to customers under 21.
The FDA typically files more than 100 complaints a week seeking so-called civil money penalties against retailers, the officials said. But after the April 1 mass firings carried out across the Department of Health and Human Services, that operation ground to a halt, effectively eradicating the agency’s main weapon against illegal tobacco sales.
“You could not have done a better job of eliminating tobacco enforcement than by doing this,” said one of the officials, who were granted anonymity for fear of retaliation. “It was the perfect pinpoint strike.”
Though honestly, why would a Trump FDA care about this? Isn’t the point of destroying government regulatory capability giving 11 year olds the freedom to be addicted to tobacco?