CDC Cuts Threaten Public Health Nationwide, Fired Employees Say

CDC Cuts Threaten Public Health Nationwide, Fired Employees Say

By Dan Vergano edited by Tanya Lewis

Widespread and chaotic layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week have weakened the agency and removed its leadership, former agency scientists warned Tuesday. The latest losses — some 600 layoffs made by the Trump administration over the weekend — removed experts on measles, child health, vital statistics and overseas Ebola outbreaks from the federal health agency, along with many others. Initially, 1,300 CDC people received layoff notices, but last Saturday the Department of Health and Human Services reversed some of those layoffs, calling them a “coding error.”

Even so, “a quarter of the CDC is gone,” Abigail Tighe of the National Public Health Coalition, a network of former CDC employees, said during a briefing for reporters at the federal agency’s headquarters in Atlanta on Tuesday. “At the highest level of leadership at the CDC, there are no public health or medical professionals left,” said Tighe, who was fired from her job as a project manager at the CDC’s Drug-Free Communities Support Program branch in February. “This round of layoffs, like all others at the CDC over the past 10 months, was an intentional attack on the American people and public health.”

An initial 1,300 layoffs, which followed the withdrawal of CDC staff in February and April, took place last Friday, triggering widespread media coverage of the losses. The layoffs included staff at the agency’s National Injury Prevention and Control Center, which tracks suicide trends, as well as those responsible for Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report (MMWR), the CDC log that reports outbreaks to public health agencies nationwide.

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Former agency employees have cast doubt on the administration’s assertion that some firings were caused by coding errors. “It really speaks to their incompetence,” said the former MMWR editor Charlotte Kent about the administration during the recent briefing. Among those fired were members of the CDC’s Washington, D.C., office, whose goal is to inform Congress about the agency’s actions and spending. The layoffs were part of a larger workforce reduction the Trump administration made to federal agencies across the government amid an ongoing federal budget shutdown.

On Monday, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told The Associated Press that the furloughed employees were deemed nonessential. He called the layoffs office eliminations “contradictory to the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.” Speaking in context Tuesday, an HHS spokesperson said Scientific American that all reduction notices were due to the current government shutdown and only affected “non-essential” furloughed workers. The spokesperson did not comment in response to the public health complaints.

Comments at the recent briefing echoed other facts at Scientific American over the weekend by still employed agency staff who saw no reason or justification in the layoffs. “At this point, there is no error. They have had time to review the process,” says a CDC scientist, who is still employed at the agency and asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

During these chaotic layoffs, CDC human resources staff were called back from leave to process their own layoffs, according to speakers. “This bulldozing doesn’t help anything,” a fired CDC scientist said on the call, speaking anonymously about concerns about attacks on public health personnel after an August shooting on the CDC campus that killed DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose. She suggested that these layoffs could be aimed at privatizing the CDC’s public health functions. “Do you want to pay a fee to find out flu rates in your state? Do you want to subscribe to a service warning of a measles outbreak in your community?” 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 the news conference, referring to those laid off. Employees and unions are still assessing the exact number and offices affected, but it is clear the cuts have affected the entire public health agency, she said.

On Tuesday evening, a union representative for the American Federation of Government Employees clarified that the total number of CDC employees lost since January included about 3,000 people separated from the agency entirely, either through a reduction in force in April or laid off through other disputed means. Another 1,300 people are on administrative leave as part of other downsizing attempts, being paid but not working.

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