At least 600 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States are receiving permanent termination notices in the wake of a recent court decision that protected some CDC employees from layoffs but not others.
The notices went out this week, and many people have not yet received them, according to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 2,000 dues-paying members at CDC.
The CDC played a crucial role in gathering data and setting health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The terminations come months after Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced efforts to let go of 20,000 employees, downsizing the department by more than 20 percent.
AFGE officials said they are aware of at least 600 employees being cut.
But “due to a staggering lack of transparency from HHS”, the union hasn’t received formal notices about who is being laid off, the federation said in a statement on Wednesday.
The permanent cuts include about 100 people who worked in violence prevention. Some employees noted that those cuts came less than two weeks after a man fired at least 180 bullets into the CDC’s campus and killed a police officer.
“The irony is devastating: The very experts trained to understand, interrupt and prevent this kind of violence were among those whose jobs were eliminated,” some of the affected employees wrote in a blog post last week.
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