CDC Cuts Threaten Public Health Nationwide, Fired Employees Say

CDC cuts threaten public health across the country, laid-off employees say

TO Dan Vergano edited by Lewis asked

Widespread, chaotic layoffs The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week weakened the agency and removed its leadership, former agency scientists warned Tuesday. The latest losses – about 600 layoffs made by the Trump administration over the weekend – have left the federal health agency without experts on measles, children's health, vital statistics and Ebola outbreaks abroad, among many others. Initially, 1,300 people at the CDC received layoff notices, but last Saturday the Department of Health and Human Services reversed some of these layoffscalling them a “coding error”.

Despite this, “a quarter of the CDC has disappeared,” said Abigail Thai from the National Public Health Coalition, a network of former CDC employees, at a briefing for reporters at the federal agency's headquarters in Atlanta on Tuesday. “There are no public health experts or medical professionals left at the highest level of CDC leadership,” said Tighe, who was laid off in February from her job as a project manager for the CDC's Drug-Free Communities Program office. “This series of layoffs, like all others that have occurred at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the past 10 months, was a deliberate attack on the American people and public health.”

The first 1,300 layoffs that followed CDC staff layoffs in February and April, which unfolded late last Friday, causing extensive news coverage losses. The layoffs included employees at the agency's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which tracks suicide trends, and those responsible for Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report (MMWR), CDC journal which reports disease outbreaks to public health authorities across the country.

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Former department employees questioned the administration's assertion that some of the layoffs were caused by coding errors. “It really shows their incompetence,” said the former MMWR Editor-in-Chief Charlotte Kent on the administration at a recent briefing. Among those released are members of the CDC's Washington office, which aims to inform Congress about the agency's actions and spending. The layoffs were part of broader staff cuts the Trump administration has made at federal agencies across the government amid the ongoing federal budget shutdown.

On Monday, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon Associated Press reported that the laid-off employees were deemed non-essential. He characterized the layoffs as office cuts “that run counter to the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again agenda.” Speaking about the story on Tuesday, an HHS spokesperson said Scientific American that all redundancy notices were due to the current government shutdown and only included “non-essential” furloughed workers. The spokesman did not comment on the public health complaints.

The comments at the recent briefing echoed others made Scientific American over the weekend, still working agency employees who saw no reason or justification for the layoffs. “There are no errors at this point. They've had time to test the process,” says one CDC scientist who still works for the agency and asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

During the chaotic layoffs, CDC human resources employees were brought back from leave to process their own layoffs, speakers said. “These bulldozers are not helping anything,” a fired CDC scientist said by phone, speaking anonymously about concerns about attacks on public health workers after August shooting on the CDC campus where DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose died. She suggested the layoffs could be aimed at privatizing the CDC's public health functions. “Would you like to pay a fee to find out the flu rate in your state? Would you like to sign up for a measles outbreak alert service in your area?” she warned.

“We don't even know what the real numbers are,” Karen Remley, former director of the agency's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, said at a briefing, referring to the people laid off. She said both employees and unions were still assessing the exact number of offices affected, but it was clear the cuts affected the entire public health agency.

At a second briefing on the CDC layoffs on Tuesday afternoon, a union representative from the American Federation of Government Employees clarified that the total number of CDC employees lost since January included about 2,000 people who were given layoff notices, and about 1,000 more who quit, retired or took up US DOGE's paid early retirement offer.

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