By Bulletin Staff
The Trump administration is scrambling to rehire the zombie response experts it dismissed last week amid concerns that their firing could result in unchecked outbreaks of the living dead, according to government sources.
The Office of Zombie Emergency Interdiction, better known by the initials ZEI, is the US government agency responsible for containing undead flareups. The office’s website is now offline, but a cached version on the “Wayback Machine” from 2024 states that the ZEI responded to more than 1,200 outbreak incidents in 2023.
Last Wednesday, hundreds of ZEI employees received termination letters after a member of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) apparently flagged them by accidentally typing “ZEI” instead of “DEI” in a search query, according to government sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
DOGE has been carrying out a Trump executive order to root out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government. US media have reported on numerous incidents where DOGE has targeted for termination programs that have nothing to do with DEI.
In the wake of the “ZEI”/“DEI” typo, more than 90 percent of ZEI’s staff received an email on Wednesday stating that they were being terminated for poor performance, according to the government sources.
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ZEI, disputed that any of the office’s “essential zombie interdiction staff” had been dismissed. The spokesperson told the Bulletin that “only a few incompetent pencil pushers and irrelevant bean counters” were dismissed.
In 2024, the office’s website stated that it employed just over 1,400 people. Nearly all of Wednesday’s layoffs were experienced zombie combat veterans directly involved in ensuring that undead outbreaks don’t escalate into civilization-ending apocalypses, the sources said.
The now-cancelled ZEI website featured letters of praise from presidential administrations dating back to President Truman highlighting the critical role of its highly trained “license to kill the dead” staff in maintaining the nation’s security.
The “DEI”/“ZEI” typo came to light in the hours after the email went out as a result of a federal lawsuit filed by the union representing ZEI employees to halt the termination.
“ZEI staff carry out the sacred duty of protecting the American public from the unholy dead, and this unwarranted and frankly ridiculous action to eliminate the office puts millions of hardworking Americans at risk of zombification,” the suit states.
In the lawsuit, the union states that at the time most of its staff was terminated, the ZEI was engaged in suppressing more than two dozen zombie outbreaks in 19 states, most urgently the Texas outbreak that has already claimed more than 400 of the living. Zombie experts have linked the Texas outbreak to the growing so-called “zombie virus skeptic” movement.
While not admitting any error on its part, the Trump administration has tried to rescind the firings, but it has been unable to contact the zombie-outbreak-containment experts, who were locked out of their official email accounts.
“It’s a complete ‘zeke show.’ These jokers have no idea what we do, or how great the risk of a planet-killing zombie outbreak is,” said one now-maybe-ex-ZEI employee said. “I guess a few million ‘likes’ on Twitter or X or whatever the f**k they’re calling it now are worth more than a few thousand years of institutional knowledge in how to keep the undead from overrunning the planet.”
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