Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved one step closer to his goal of dismantling the nation’s premier public-health agency by dismissing more than 1,000 scientists, doctors and public health officials from the Department of Health and Human Services late Friday night.
The dramatic move came during the second week of a government shutdown and is part of the Trump administration’s aggressive push to even further slash the size of the federal workforce and punish Democrats. The culling reportedly started with at least 4,000 people across departments including Education, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development and Energy, among others.
But the bloodshed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was especially acute, according to a list crowdsourced by CDC employees who received layoff notices that was viewed by MSNBC. The firings ran across more than a dozen CDC divisions and centers, wiping out entire offices and teams that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease responses, collect data, publish scientific reports and communicate with global partners and Congress.
“CDC is over. It was killed,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the former director of the CDC’s National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who recently resigned to protest what he described as Kennedy’s unscientific takeover of the CDC. “This administration only knows how to break things. They have made America at risk for outbreaks and attacks by nefarious players. People should be scared.”
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The emails alerting staffers came late Friday night, but current and former employees said CDC staffers had been bracing for layoffs since President Donald Trump signaled that he would use mass reductions in force as a way to punish Democrats for the ongoing shutdown, caused by a budget standoff between Republicans and Democrats.
Notification that they’d lost their jobs came even as the human resources professional tasked with implementation had been furloughed as part of the shutdown.
Several current and former officials said they initially believed the cuts — like other chaotic firings that were later walked back — might not be permanent. And there is a question about the legality of all employee firings during the shutdown. And, indeed, following publication of this article, many fired employees began receiving emails with the subject line, “Recession of Previous Notice of Reduction in Force,” communicating that that despite the earlier notice, they would no longer be fired. An HHS official who declined to be named because he was not approved to speak on the issue, told MSNBC that around half of the firings had been done in error.
The official said leadership in the Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Center, the Global Health Center, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report team, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and scientists working on responses to outbreaks of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo and measles in the U.S., had received or would soon receive notices that their lay-offs had been rescinded. The official said the accidental firings had been the result of a “miscoding error.”
Regardless, three senior officials said, the damage has already been done.
In a move that may alarm lawmakers, the CDC’s entire Washington office was also cut. That office served as the agency’s conduit to Congress and to the broader Washington, D.C., public health community.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon texted a statement that blamed Democrats for the sweeping cuts and called the public health agency “a bloated bureaucracy.”
The incident manager and the deputy incident manager tasked with measles response were also fired, according to three senior sources. Both are being reinstated, however, according to a senior official. The country is experiencing its largest measles outbreak in three decades. Three people have died of measles this year and hundreds of children are currently forced to quarantine because of outbreaks in South Carolina and Minnesota.
The incident manager and the deputy incident manager tasked with measles response were also fired, according to three senior sources. Both are being reinstated, however, according to a senior official. The country is experiencing its largest measles outbreak in three decades. Three people have died of measles this year and hundreds of children are currently forced to quarantine because of outbreaks in South Carolina and Minnesota.
Nothing screams “Make America Healthy Again” quite like firing experts tasked with stopping disease outbreaks. But at least we can be sure this was done with the utmost care, rather than firing people willy-nilly because those in charge don’t understand what “non-essential” means in the context of a government shutdown.
