Federal health agencies are reeling from mass layoffs on Friday that appear to have particularly devastated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some terminations being rescinded on Saturday.
Numbers are still sketchy, but reports from Friday indicate that more than 4,000 federal workers overall were initially targeted for layoffs. The Trump administration linked the firings to the ongoing government shutdown, which legal experts have suggested is illegal. Unions representing federal workers have already filed a lawsuit challenging the move.
Of the reported 4,000 terminations, about 1,100 to 1,200 were among employees in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is a massive department that houses critical federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others. Before Trump's second term, the HHS workforce was about 82,000, but that was slashed to about 62,000 earlier this year amid initial cuts and efforts to push civil servants out.
While it's unclear where all the new cuts occurred, reports from anonymous and external sources describe a major gutting of the CDC, an agency that has already been severely wounded, losing significant numbers this year. Its former leaders have accused the Trump administration of censoring its scientific work. It suffered a dramatic ousting of its Senate-confirmed director in August. And it was the target of a gunman weeks earlier, who shot over 500 rounds at its employees, killing a local police officer.
As terminations went out Friday, reports indicated that the terminations hit staff who produce the CDC's esteemed journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, employees responding to the measles outbreaks in the US, others responding to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, workers in the Global Health Center, and disease detectives in the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
These cuts were reportedly reversed, with emails rescinding the terminations going out on Saturday. A federal health official told ABC News on Saturday that the quick back-pedal was down to a "coding error."
“Massacre”
While it's unclear how many of the terminations have been rescinded, the ones that appear to remain stand to severely hamper critical activities of the agency.
Stat reported that the layoffs have decimated several offices. The layoffs included all the personnel in the CDC’s Washington, DC, office. Other terminations were in the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology; the Office of Human Resources; the office of the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; the Office of Science, including people responsible for gathering information on global health threats; the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control; and the CDC’s library.
On Sunday, Axios spoke with Debra Houry, the former chief medical officer for the CDC, who resigned in protest over the Trump administration's censorship of science. Houry added to the outlet that terminations hit the employees working on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which supports the "Make America Healthy Again" initiative by health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Cuts also affected the ethics office that reviews conflicts of interest.
One high-ranking official terminated in the layoffs told Stat that leaders of multiple divisions were slashed, calling it a "massacre."
"The executive branch is using the shutdown as cover for an intentional and targeted dismantling of leadership across the agency. It’s designed to sow chaos, demoralize career staff, and cripple the federal scientific infrastructure that protects Americans’ health," the official told Stat. "Calling this a budget issue is a lie. It’s an abuse of power—unethical, unlawful, and profoundly dangerous."
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