On her first day on the job last week, new US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins held a meeting to review the agency’s options for controlling the bird flu outbreak and possibly help lower the price of eggs.

Chickens in one of our poultry barns tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza, otherwise known as bird flu. We immediately called our local U.S. Department of Agriculture office, but we already knew what was inevitable.

The Trump administration has fired about a quarter of the personnel at an Agriculture Department program that tracks the spread of bird flu, and has laid off some 1,200 employees at the National Institutes of Health—including many promising young disease detectives.