Dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including “disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists and the entire Washington office — were notified late Friday that they were losing their jobs as part of the Trump administration’s latest round of federal layoffs.
It was unclear on Friday how many C.D.C. workers were affected. But it was the latest blow to an agency that has been wracked by mass resignations, a shooting at its Atlanta headquarters in August and the firing of its director under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Layoff notices landed in the email inboxes of C.D.C. employees shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, notifying employees that their duties had been deemed unnecessary or “virtually identical” to those being performed elsewhere in the agency. Scientists, including leaders, in offices addressing respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, injury prevention and global health were among those affected.
The staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the journal that reports on health trends and emerging infectious threats, was also laid off. The publication’s storied history includes a June 1981 report that five previously healthy gay men were treated for an unusual pneumonia — the first hint of the AIDS epidemic.
Roughly 70 Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — the so-called “disease detectives” who respond to outbreaks around the globe — received layoff notices, according to a person familiar with them. The service was spared during an earlier round of layoffs in February.
An officer at an American Federation of Government Employees local union representing C.D.C. employees said that the agency’s human resources staff, which had been furloughed as part of the government shutdown, had been called back to work to send out layoff notices to their colleagues.
The C.D.C. layoffs are part of a round of cuts across the government to fulfill President Trump’s threats to use the shutdown to shrink the federal government. But for the nation’s public health agency, which has been a primary target of Mr. Kennedy, they were the latest crisis in a year of upheaval.
In late August, just weeks after a gunman opened fire on the C.D.C.’s headquarters in Atlanta, Mr. Kennedy orchestrated the ouster of Susan Monarez, the agency’s new director, who had been in her job for less than a month.
Dr. Monarez later told Senate lawmakers that during a series of tense meetings with Mr. Kennedy, he called the C.D.C. “the most corrupt federal agency” in the government, and accused its employees of “killing children.”
Mr. Trump has said there would be “a lot” of layoffs during the shutdown, and promised that the cuts would be “Democrat oriented.” The C.D.C. has been the subject of intense criticism on the political right since the Covid-19 pandemic, when many Republicans accused the agency and its leaders of promoting strict vaccination guidelines and lockdowns, to which they objected.
Earlier on Friday, as part of a medical checkup at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump received a Covid booster shot and a flu vaccine, according to the White House.
Several C.D.C. employees, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, described the mood Friday night as grim. Some noticed a pattern: This latest round of layoffs came on the eve of the Indigenous Peoples’ Day holiday weekend, while previous cuts to federal health agencies were announced on Valentine’s Day and April Fools’ Day.
The layoff notices, signed by Tom Nagy, the chief human capital officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, arrived with 10 attachments, including information about severance pay, how to file an appeal to overturn the layoffs and a “guide to career transition,” according to copies of the documents obtained by The New York Times.
A memo informed recipients that the action “does not reflect directly on your service, performance or conduct,” and that they would be placed on administrative leave without access to their offices, as of Friday, “unless directed otherwise by your leadership.”
Mr. Nagy concluded: “Leadership at H.H.S. appreciates your service.”
Tony Romm and Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
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