‘Instability and confusion’ as CDC slashes 1,300 jobs before reinstating half | Trump administration
More than a thousand employees at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received notice Friday that they were losing their jobs, in a move that wiped out entire offices and led to a partial reversal over the weekend.
Debra Houry, the CDC’s former chief medical officer, said this caused “instability and disruption.”
Trump administration says nearly 700 reduction in force (RIF) notices were mistakenly sent to employees reportedly says, but there appears to be no public evidence of an error. Another 600 dismissed employees were not reinstated.
“It looks like they went into the agency with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel,” Houry said. “The fact that they brought half of them back shows they didn’t think through what they were doing.”
The entire staff of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a highly respected epidemiology journal, was terminated and then reinstated. So did global health and suicide prevention workers, as well as “disease detectives” and staff from the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
But the entire human resources department is still missing, which will impact the operations of the entire agency.
Houry said the Washington office is still intermittent, which “makes communication with Congress difficult” because they are the main conduit for congressional investigations.
The staff and ethics office on the CDC’s institutional review board, which reviews the design of the studies and oversees any conflicts and interests of CDC leaders and advisory committee members, were also released.
Within the next 30 days, some science protocols will be up for renewal by the institutional review board.
“They’re going to have to be shut down,” Houry said.
The National Center for Health Statistics was hit hard with layoffs of staff working on nutrition research and electronic health records, and employees in its science office were laid off. The program that offered benefits to employees was also cut. These workers have provided mental health support, especially amid waves of layoffs and in the wake of a mass shooting two months ago that left officer David Rose dead and shook the agency.
“This no longer exists,” Houry said.
Many people from the data office and the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics were laid off; This will impact CDC’s ability to inform the public about outbreaks.
Houry is not convinced that the canceled notifications were a coding error; He believes the jobs may have been reinstated after public outcry.
In the past, a few people were accidentally laid off because they had recently changed jobs or there was an error in the coding of their job, and so they mistakenly received automatic termination notices.
“It usually doesn’t affect hundreds of people,” he said. “When you look at what has been reinstated so far, those are the ones that have been given the most attention.”
HHS did not respond to the Guardian’s questions at press time about why some CDC employees received notification that they were being reinstated and whether officials had documentation of an error.
Since the beginning of the Trump administration, thousands of people have left the CDC due to layoffs, retirements, layoffs and job changes. Leaders asked employees to report when they received notifications because they were not notified or were not part of the process.
“There doesn’t appear to be any thought behind the cuts this weekend,” Houry said. “The capacity to respond to an outbreak or communities is hampered.”
Measles, for example, continues to spread across the country in the worst outbreak in three decades, and if it continues for the next few months, the United States will lose its qualifying status.
“We really need Congress to ask questions about how these RIFs occur, especially when they are ad hoc.” [budget] lines. Houry said the CDC really needs the public support of Congress at this point.
“CDC takes care of the public. We need the public to take care of the CDC.”
