Critically important staff at the Centers for Disease Control received layoff (“RIF”) letters on Friday night in what was described as a Friday night massacre. The layoffs echoed what had happened to hundreds of others1 in August, shortly before Dr. Susan Monarez’s ouster by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and after the shooting at the CDC.
Friday’s terminations at the CDC notably affected the CDC’s crown jewels—the Epidemic Intelligence Service, known as the disease detectives—and the prestigious Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which alerts us to emerging infectious diseases.
Other divisions initially thought to have been terminated were leadership of National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and Global Health Center, among many others listed by Jeremy Faust in Inside Medicine.
Before the ink had dried on this post, some staffers received new notices that the Reduction in Force notices to them had been sent in error. How many people had their positions terminated, and who they are, is as yet unclear. The Hill reports that more than 4,100 Federal employees were laid off on Friday, 1,100-1,200 at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought announced the action on X (formerly known as Twitter): “The RIFs have begun.” HHS reportedly said the RIFs were “a direct consequence of the Democrat-led shutdown.” They added, “All HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions.”
It’s unclear at this time what positions were eliminated.
But it is clear that Vought has achieved one of his stated goals:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video released by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.”
While some of the terminations have been retracted, it’s unclear how many or exactly which positions.
The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a 2-year program in which new PhDs and physicians form a SWAT team for epidemics and disasters.
Early Saturday, I reached out to Maryn McKenna, MS, a journalist and historian of the CDC. She said, “The EIS have been the rapid responders to every major outbreak in the US and internationally since the program’s founding in 1951 — polio, smallpox, Ebola, AIDS — and the MMWR is where CDC and state epidemiologists warn about and analyze what's emerging. To lose either is honestly shocking." She added, "These actions threaten to cripple the core CDC mission of rushing to eruptions of disease and figuring out how to stop them.”
For now, we are told that the MMWR staff have been fully reinstated, as have the EIS officers, including those helping stem the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa.
The measles response team had been dismissed—at a time when we have reached a 30-year high in measles cases with active outbreaks in South Carolina, Minnesota, and along the Arizona-New Mexico border. They, too, have now been reinstated.
Various reasons are being given for why the terminations were sent on Friday and then retracted the next day. One administration official claims the employees “were sent incorrect notifications,” which were then fixed.
Others suggest that someone recognized the importance of having experienced staff when dealing with things like outbreaks of Ebola and measles.
Vice President JD Vance explained that a “government shutdown inevitably leads to some chaos. It happened because Chuck Schumer shut down the government.”
Another explanation is that “accusations that the administration was using the government shutdown as a pretense to accomplish other political goals seemed to be sticking.”
Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and Defend Public Health Coordinating Committee member, was pointed in his criticism in a statement from the group. “Did they really not know they were firing the people tracking Ebola? Did they not care enough to find out who they were firing and what they did before sending termination letters? The carelessness and callousness with which this administration handles life and death matters is unbelievable.” He added, “If these new firings aren’t all reversed, people are going to suffer and very likely some will die. Viruses and bacteria don’t care about where you live or what political party you belong to, and the administration’s reckless destruction threatens every one of us.”
Some, including Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, hypothesize that the administration backtracked in part because of the intense public backlash and negative media coverage over the firings. Daskalakis was director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC until he quit after Dr. Susan Monarez, CDC Director, was fired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (At least three other leaders there quit in solidarity as well—Dr. Debra Houry, chief medical officer and deputy director, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, head of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Jennifer Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.)
In an interview, Daskalakis was scathing in his criticisms of the firings, describing them as “brinksmanship” run amok. The administration knows that there will be lawsuits because “this is likely an illegal move” and that many of the staff will be back. He thought the reinstatements might be just temporizing.
He added, “Career servants, civil servants who are critical to the security of the nation as well as to the individual health of people— they’re like, ‘Why am I going to stay for this? Would you stay now?” He mused, “Why would you stay if you're that disposable and, to go deeper, why would you apply to go to a school of public health?” If people see no future in public health or government service, will we find ourselves in a world where there is no warning of impending outbreaks of diseases that will ravage us?
Daskalakis further criticized the administration for withdrawing from the World Health Organization. “They have no plan what to do when they do that. How are they going to learn about what flu is circulating? How are they going to know about the next emerging infection? They have no plan. They know how to break but they don’t know how to govern. And so, they see it as dispensable.” He added, even if staff come back, the “CDC is not going to be able to respond to anything, and they're going to keep breaking it. And this is it.”
What is the public health goal of this administration?