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1,300 people at the CDC received termination notices, but last Saturday the Department of Health and Human Services rescinded some of these firings, calling them a “coding error.”

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

An initial 1,300 firings, which followed removals of CDC personnel in February and April, unfolded late last Friday, sparking widespread news coverage of losses. The firings included staff at the agency’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control who track suicide trends and those in charge of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the CDC journal that reports disease outbreaks to public health agencies nationwide.

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Former agency employees doubted the administration’s claim that some dismissals were caused by coding errors. “It really speaks to their incompetence,” said former MMWR editor in chief Charlotte Kent about the administration at the recent briefing. Among those who were let go are members of the Washington, D.C., CDC office, which is intended to inform Congress about the agency’s actions and spending. The firings were part of a larger reduction in force that the Trump administration made to federal agencies across the government amid an ongoing federal budget shutdown.

On Monday HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told the Associated Press that the laid off employees were deemed nonessential. He characterized the firings as eliminating offices “at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.” Speaking on background on Tuesday, an HHS spokesperson told Scientific American that all the reduction-in-force notices were because of the current government shutdown and only included “nonessential” furloughed workers. The spokesperson did not comment in response to the complaints of harm to public health.

The comments at the recent briefing echoed others made to Scientific American over the weekend by still-employed agency personnel who saw no reasoning or justification in the layoffs. “At this point, there are no mistakes. They had time to vet the process,” says one CDC scientist, who is still employed at the agency and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation.

In the chaotic firings, human resources personnel at the CDC were brought back in from furlough to process their own firings, according to the briefers. “This bulldozing is not helping a single thing,” said a fired CDC scientist on the call, speaking anonymously over concerns about attacks on public health personnel after an August shooting at the CDC campus that killed DeKalb County police officer David Rose. She suggested the firings might be aimed at privatizing the CDC’s public health functions. “Do you want to pay a fee to see rates of flu 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,” said Karen Remley, former director of the agency’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, at the briefing, referring to the people who were dismissed. Both employees and unions are still assessing the exact number and offices affected, but it is clear that the cuts have affected the entire public health agency, she said.

Late on Tuesday evening, an American Federation of Government Employees union representative clarified that the total number of personnel at the CDC lost since January include around 3,000 people fully separated from the agency either through an April reduction-in-force or fired by other, contested, means. An added 1,300 are on administrative leave as part of other attempted reduction-in-force actions, being paid but not working.

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