The Trump administration has a bureaucratic mutiny on its hands. The day before Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was scheduled to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, “over 1,000 current and former HHS staff” issued a public letter demanding that their boss resign. The September 3 letter follows an August 8 ultimatum letter telling Secretary Kennedy how to do his job.

The brightest flashpoint in Kennedy’s battle with his own workforce has come at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Last week, dozens of CDC employees walked out on the job and staged a protest outside, complete with signs and chants, over the firing or resignation of several top officials.

Among the departing officials was Trump’s own Senate-confirmed CDC Director Susan Monarez, sworn in only weeks earlier on July 29. Top officials serve at the pleasure of the president, and Trump’s pleasure with Monarez’s service expired over her differences with Kennedy. Monarez’s lawyers first disputed whether she had been fired, but after the White House confirmed her firing, Monarez herself wrote a blistering op-ed against the Trump administration in The Wall Street Journal.

“As her attorney’s statement makes abundantly clear, Susan Monarez is not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” responded White House spokesman Kush Desai last Wednesday. “Since Susan Monarez refused to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so, the White House has terminated Monarez from her position with the CDC.”

Monarez’s firing triggered resignations from “Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the director of CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Debra Houry, CDC’s chief medical officer and former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control,” listed the disgruntled staffers.

Amid the turmoil, the CDC headquarters in Atlanta narrowly avoided a mass casualty shooting in early August, after a man convinced of anti-vaccine beliefs attacked it and killed a police officer. CDC staff blamed Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric for the attack, although Kennedy himself stated, “No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others.”

The public protests and letters by agency staffers are inappropriate political attempts to influence policy by government employees who did not hold policy-setting positions. If a government employee suspects corruption, misbehavior, or partisan bias in his workplace, the appropriate course of action is to file whistleblower reports with the appropriate congressional committees. If enough whistleblowers report to Congress, the appropriate committee will almost certainly have to take action.

But that’s not what these bureaucrats did. By publicly airing their dirty laundry, these employees have tried to evade the chain of command and undermine their boss in the court of public opinion. The first HHS letter tried to dictate policy to the HHS secretary. The second HHS letter demanded his resignation. The CDC protest objected to President Trump’s firing of a director who departed from his policy.

Such actions lead to a strange conclusion: these bureaucrats think that they, not President Trump, can choose the personnel to lead America’s health agencies, and that they, not President Trump’s appointees, have the authority to set U.S. health policies. This bureaucratic presumption is totally alien to the principles of representative government.

“The Deep State” is an imprecise, often misused term. But its abuse does not invalidate the real phenomenon it describes. The term refers to unelected, career government employees who undermine elected government officials, substituting their own judgment in place of the choices made by American voters. Here, bureaucrats at the HHS and CDC have been caught doing just that.

Opponents (and perhaps some friends) of the Trump administration might defend these bureaucrats by suggesting that they are right to oppose Secretary Kennedy’s agenda (such as changes to the vaccine schedule) on public health grounds. Judging the merits of the debate is beyond the scope of this piece, which merely argues that these government employees have registered their objections in an inappropriate way. They are trying to double their influence by carrying out government policy — and setting it too.

Furthermore, given the disgraceful, authoritarian way in which American public health authorities handled the COVID-19 pandemic, they should humbly recognize how little credibility they have to oppose a reform agenda.

During his Thursday testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy was questioned about whether Monarez was fired for refusing to go along with his vaccine recommendations, as she alleged. Kennedy denied making any such demand and accused Monarez of lying.

Meanwhile, non-legislators sat in the back of the hearing room, with the words “Fire RFK” printed on “what looked like white lab coats.” It’s highly likely these individuals worked for HHS or CDC.