Fourteen people were dead and 14,000 were in danger. A never-before-seen form of fungal meningitis was spreading fear and illness from Tennessee to Virginia and Maryland and 20 other states.

My friend J. Todd Weber, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, assembled an emergency response team. Medical sleuths fanned out, examining patients and records. Todd and his colleagues quickly discovered that all of the patients had been treated with a long-acting steroid that eased swelling and calmed pain in people with herniated discs and some kinds of arthritis.

CDC doctors traced the source of the outbreak to three contaminated lots of the drug, made at a compounding facility in Massachusetts. Then Todd and his team followed the trail of the bad doses and contacted everyone who’d received the shot so they could be examined and treated, if necessary.

That all unfolded in the fall of 2012, and the heroes of the tale were federal employees, the kind of people Shadow Emperor Elon now refers to as “our bureaucratic opponents.” He sneers at such folks for “optimistically working 40 hours a week” while he and his digital house cleaners spend 120 hours a week demolishing structures built to protect us.

Todd and his fellow medical detectives didn’t know about 40-hour weeks. They regularly went 24/7 during public health crises, such as the covid-19 pandemic or that meningitis outbreak, which eventually infected more than 700 people and caused 53 deaths.

While his colleagues at the CDC labs identified the pathogen and developed tests to detect the infection, Todd updated thousands of doctors nationwide and developed materials read by more than 1 million Americans. Thanks to Todd and his team, bad outcomes decreased dramatically, the CDC later concluded.

Such facts don’t seem to matter much to Musk and his operatives; dozens of disease detectives in the Epidemic Intelligence Service were fired Friday (though a subsequent, shorter termination list sent by Trump administration officials to the CDC may have spared many of the epidemiologists).

Todd was a key source for me when I was reporting on the early months of the covid pandemic — a vital guide to the superb work government scientists were doing and to the political obstacles they faced.

I can say that now because a few months ago, after breaking his clavicle in a bicycling accident, my friend died on an operating table, a tragic turn in what should have been fairly routine surgery.

Contrast Todd, who spent his career taking on tough medical mysteries and saving lives, with President Donald Trump, who recklessly denounces the work of federal employees as criminal, and Elon Musk, who gleefully targets our nation’s finest for sacking.

The president and his overcaffeinated sidekick portray government workers as losers — second-rate slackers who couldn’t make it in the private sector and loll about in luxurious D.C., doing little for eye-popping salaries.

The reality is that we taxpayers employ thousands of people who choose to serve the public, forsaking much more lucrative work in the private sector.

Todd spent 32 years at the U.S. Public Health Service and the CDC. He was a fed, and never really wanted to be anything else.

Well, not never. When I first met Todd, in college, he was a fellow campus journalist. Growing up loving good stories and great sentences, he charted a course toward newspaper work. During an internship with investigative reporting legend Jack Anderson, Todd got a tip about women in Oregon who suffered miscarriages after being exposed to a contaminated herbicide that had been sprayed around their homes. Todd’s reporting about the women and the doctors who figured out what was damaging them led him to pivot: “I knew public health was the only thing I wanted to do.”

Although he was nearing graduation as an English major, Todd spent his last months on campus bingeing on science classes, then entered a postcollege, premed program. His path was set.

In 2013, when he won a Service to America medal, Todd was asked about the wisest words he’d ever heard. “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts,” he replied.

Facts drove Todd’s work. And facts are this administration’s nemesis. It will take considerable time, but the people who collect and disseminate facts — the federal scientists whose work Trump undermines, the news media he pretends to despise (even as he craves our attention and respect), and the judges who overturn his pronouncements seemingly by the hour — will eventually prevail because in the end, everyone wants to live longer, happier, healthier lives.

And although grifts, lies and chicanery can be emotionally satisfying, facts lead to the security and creativity that mark good lives.

The Trump-Musk jihad against federal workers is a carnival act designed to put the president center stage and establish the far richer X owner as the power behind the throne.

At bottom, federal workers are just a convenient target for Trump’s blame game. Only five years ago, during his first term, Trump wrote a letter “To Our Incredible Federal Workforce,” citing “your devoted and vigilant efforts” and “your great contributions to this Nation” and giving them “the largest raise in more than 10 years.”

Todd was funny, kind and grounded in facts — not Trump’s kind of guy. Asked once for his favorite bureaucratic expression, Todd came up with “Out of an abundance of caution.”

“When you’re working through novel or unknown dangers with high risks,” he explained, “this is not a bad way to start … until you have information to make evidence-based recommendations.”

Sounds like experience. Sounds like the antithesis of the Trump-Musk approach. Sounds like wisdom.

Marc Fisher is an associate editor of The Washington Post.