Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Donald Trump, warned Wednesday that the administration has left the United States vulnerable to a biological terrorist attack — making Trump, in his words, "playing roulette with our lives."

"Not-fun fact: Trump decimated the DHS office that protects the U.S. from bio threats, like Russia's plague incident," Taylor wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. "Hundreds of staff from the 'Office of Countering WMD' have been pushed out, fired, or reassigned in Trump 2.0."

In a report for The I Paper, Taylor argued that Trump is "playing roulette with our lives" and cited a recent news story he said proves the point.

"The circumstances surrounding the death of a 28-year-old lab technician at a Russian research institute remain clouded with uncertainty, but one point is clear: Donald Trump is actively dismantling the structures needed to protect the world from a potential future biological incident," Taylor wrote.

The case he referenced involved Darya Shipilova, who allegedly destroyed a test tube of pneumonic plague bacteria at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Russia.

"Not long ago, it was my job to worry about situations like this," Taylor continued. "As chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security, I designed and stood up the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, one of the biggest reorganisations of the department since it was created after 9/11."

Taylor's description places biological threats within a broader WMD mission that also included detecting dirty bombs and bioterror plots.

According to Taylor, "Trump has taken apart the government office specifically designed to protect the American people from bio threats of this seriousness. After Elon Musk's Doge team set its sights on the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, Trump told Congress he didn't need it anymore, and this spring it was effectively deleted. Hundreds of WMD experts were scattered across DHS, reassigned to other work or pushed out. More than half the staff is now gone. Specialists who spent years learning how to spot a dirty bomb or a bioterror plot are now so hard to locate that lawmakers have asked government auditors to check whether anyone is still doing the job."

"I've talked to these people," he added. "They couldn't believe that — or understand why — the White House would want to destroy an office responsible for detecting and stopping the next plague. Situations like the one in Russia are why they existed. But it's too late. Their operation has already been dismantled."

"I can't overstate how reckless this is," Taylor wrote in the opinion piece.

The warning is the latest in a string of public rebukes from Taylor, who has previously blasted Trump as a sore loser who is secretly disliked by many of the Republicans who work alongside him.

"When Donald Trump loses, he lashes out," Taylor wrote in September. "And if the past few days are any indicator, his top advisers will be getting phone calls – like we did in his first term – demanding extreme measures. Only this time, he'll have a more compliant audience... I can tell you what probably happened inside the White House late last night and this morning, because in that first term, I was on the receiving end."

In August, he argued that "It's closer to a prayer than a slogan: I wish he would disappear. The reference is to Donald Trump, of course. Never before have Republicans had to campaign under the banner of such a weak figurehead, nor one so insistent on stapling his toxic brand to the party, whether the party likes it or not."