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firing of Hundreds of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and PreventionAnd his sudden reinstatement after an “error” sent retrenchment notices to key staff has caused a stir Chaos in the country’s public health agencyWho has endured 10 months of busyness Under the administration of Donald Trump.
Administration sent “reduction in force” memorandum More than 1,000 CDC employees The White House used the government shutdown ahead of the three-day holiday weekend to purge the federal workforce that has long been in its sights.
At least 1,200 employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the CDC, were laid off. According to court documentsHHS initially said the affected workers were “designated non-essential by their respective divisions,” including critical “disease detectives,” outbreak forecasters and scientists who study emerging infectious diseases.
But more than half of those notices were canceled over the weekend after being distributed in “error,” according to the union representing federal employees.
The latest chaos comes just six weeks later Top CDC officials resign en masse After the director was fired, health officials and public health experts warned that Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and their surrogates were endangering millions of lives by politicizing public health and crippling its institutions.
“Think about what it would be like to be at CDC,” wrote Demetre Daskalakis, who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases before his resignation in August.
“It’s like living with an abusive partner who attacks and then returns some of the abuse,” he added“It doesn’t make the partner any less abusive. … The CDC is damaged. Whether the firings are canceled or not. American health security has been compromised.”
According to staff unions, the staff whose dismissals were “canceled” include “disease spies” from the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the leadership of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, scientists working on the response to measles and Ebola outbreaks, and the team that compiles the morbidity and mortality weekly reports.
It was the second time this year that Athalia Christie, who is currently managing the response to the measles outbreak, was fired in error.
The agency’s entire Washington, D.C. office, which was vacated on Friday, will not be rehired.
The employees who received “incorrect” notices that they were being laid off “were never separated from the agency and have all been informed that they are not subject to a reduction in force,” an HHS official said in a statement. Independent.
According to Defend Public Health, a coalition of public health activists demanding immediate reforms within the Trump administration, the mass firings and confusion within the agency “threaten the health of everyone in America and will lead to unnecessary, preventable deaths.”
“Did they really not know they were firing people tracking Ebola? Did they not care enough to find out who they were firing and what they did before sending the termination letters?” Greg Gonsalves of Defend Public Health said in a statement.
“The recklessness and insensitivity with which this administration handles matters of life and death is unbelievable,” he said. “Viruses and bacteria don’t care where you live or what political party you belong to, and the administration’s reckless destruction threatens every single one of us.”
Unions are calling on federal judges to intervene to stop any further “illegal” firings, while thousands of other federal health workers remain furloughed during the shutdown, which is running into a third week.
“It is outrageous that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide vital services to communities across the country,” Everett Kelly, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement.
The latest cuts will likely lead to more chaos at the agency. A series of controversial public health decisions under Kennedy and a shooting at its Atlanta headquarters that left a police officer dead.
Since his appointment to the role, the vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist has put forward discredited claims about how research funding has been destroyed. Autism and Tylenol UseAnd oversaw mass layoffs and chaotic agency reorganization, including the dismissal of all members of the 17-member CDC vaccine advisory panel.
He also ousted former director Susan Monarez, who had refused to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s vaccine agenda. Following his exit, several other top officials of the agency left.
Administration officials had warned that layoffs at federal agencies the President has labeled “Democrat-oriented” during the federal government shutdown would lead to no end to the standoff between Democratic and Republican members of Congress.
But the administration is already furloughing large numbers of federal employees who aren’t taking pay checks without a budget agreement to keep the government running. The new “cuts in force” are permanent job cuts.
“The RIF has begun,” White House budget director Russell Vought said. The announcement was made on Friday.
While the office said the cuts are “substantial,” court documents show about 4,000 employees have received an initial wave of “RIF” notices. The bulk of those cuts were within HHS and the Treasury Department.
Kennedy defended the actions under his leadership during testimony before the Senate Finance Committee last month, saying, “It is imperative that we remove officials with conflicts of interest and catastrophically poor judgment and political agendas.”
“We need unbiased, politics-free, transparent, evidence-based science in the public interest,” he said. “These are the guiding principles behind the changes at CDC, and they are what you can expect from our agency for the next three years.”