The Trump administration has escalated its campaign to fire federal workers during the government shutdown, seizing the opportunity to further slash the already diminished Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Tuesday, the union that represents workers at the CDC said that the agency’s workforce has already been reduced by a quarter since the beginning of the year. During the shutdown, the public health agency, which steered U.S. health policy through the pandemic, has found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration once again.
Over the weekend, around 1,300 CDC employees received layoff notices. By Saturday, the agency rescinded roughly 700 of the planned terminations, saying that the additional unintended layoffs were due to a “coding error.” The CDC layoffs are part of a new round of mass layoffs that have reduced core parts of the federal government, including the Treasury Department, the Education Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which houses the CDC.
In August, CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired after refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives” or fire health experts on her team, according to her legal team. Many of the CDC’s top leaders followed her departure, resigning in protest and deepening the chaos roiling the nation’s public health agency.
Life-and-death stakes
Dismantling the CDC is clearly a top priority during Trump’s second term, but the risks are huge. The agency, which was largely regarded as uncontroversial and essential until the COVID-19 pandemic, is tasked with protecting Americans from infectious diseases and other public health threats, both domestic and global.
CDC employees involved in the response to the domestic measles outbreaks and an Ebola outbreak in central Africa were among those who were fired during the shutdown, but they have since had their layoff notices reversed.
Other CDC workers weren’t so lucky, including analysts working to monitor biological and chemical threats, and members of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response who work with U.S. intelligence agencies on “biodefense issues such as pandemics and weaponized pathogens,” The Washington Post reported. Other employees in the same department ran biodefense drills and monitored natural disasters, infectious disease outbreaks, and cyberattacks on health facilities.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said late last week that all fired CDC employees were designated as nonessential, defending the decision to further diminish the agency. “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda,” Nixon said.
In a joint letter from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and other organizations focused on epidemiology, public health experts condemned the firings as “a completely reckless act that may compromise the health of all Americans.”
“For nearly eight decades, CDC has worked around the clock to protect Americans from a growing range of health threats, from rabies to food safety to Ebola,” the organizations wrote. “The agency’s support of state and local health departments and healthcare professionals is the backbone of our nation’s public health response.”
Fighting the layoffs
Two unions representing federal workers, the AFGE and AFSCME, filed a lawsuit to halt the layoffs and will await a San Francisco district judge’s decision after preliminary arguments on Wednesday. The unions argue that the Trump administration is “using federal employees as pawns” to put political pressure on its political opposition, and they have asked for a temporary pause on the most recent firings. In previous government shutdowns, employees faced furloughs but were never fired en masse.
“These illegal firings of our union members during a federal government shutdown are a callous attack on hardworking Americans and put the livelihoods, health, and safety of our members and communities at great risk,” AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said in a call with reporters.
Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance defended the mass firings on NBC’s Meet the Press and blamed Democrats for the layoffs and the government shutdown. Vance misleadingly characterized the layoffs as necessary to keep other parts of the government funded and running, but many federal workers aren’t being paid during the shutdown.
“We have to lay off some federal workers in the midst of this shutdown to preserve the essential benefits for the American people that the government does provide,” Vance said.
That story conflicts with Trump’s own. The president has hailed the shutdown as a golden opportunity to slash departments and programs that he doesn’t agree with. “We’re ending some programs that we don’t want,” Trump told reporters over the weekend. “They happen to be Democrat-sponsored programs. But we’re ending some programs that we never wanted, and we’re probably not going to allow them to come back.”