(CNN) — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suffered another round of deep staff cuts, with disease detectives, outbreak forecasters, policy and data offices among those impacted, according to four sources with knowledge of the layoffs. However, after word got out over the weekend about the firings, the Trump administration said that many people were fired by mistake and were being reinstated.
“The administration did not like that CDC data did not support their narrative, so they got rid of them. They didn’t like that CDC policy groups would not rubber stamp their unscientific ideas, so they got rid of them,” according to an agency official who asked to not be named for fear of losing their job.
The fresh round of firings came after a month after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for “new blood” at the agency.
“It’s imperative that we remove officials with conflicts of interest and catastrophically bad judgment, and political agendas,” Kennedy said in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in September. “We need unbiased, politics-free, transparent, evidence-based science in the public interest. Those are the guiding principles behind the changes at the CDC, and that is what you can expect all across our agency for the next three years.”
The notices were emailed shortly after 9 p.m. on a holiday weekend, following a pattern favored by the Trump administration of carrying out layoffs of federal workers outside of normal business hours. Impacted employees said the move was especially cruel during a government shutdown, which made severance information even harder to get, since many federal workers are not in their offices or able to answer emails.
President Donald Trump said late Friday afternoon that he plans to fire “a lot” of federal workers in retaliation for the government shutdown, vowing to target those deemed to be aligned with the Democratic Party.
“We figure they started this thing, so they should be Democrat-oriented,” Trump said, placing blame for the shutdown on Democratic lawmakers. Trump did not provide details on what qualified the affected workers as “Democrat-oriented.”
A court filing in that case indicates more than 4,100 federal workers were impacted by the cuts, with between 1,100 and 1,200 from HHS. As of Friday evening, RIF notices had also gone out to employees at the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury, according to department spokespeople, union representatives and sources directly impacted.
The legality of firing federal workers during a government shutdown is also in question. Shortly after Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought posted “The RIFs have begun” on X on Friday, the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents federal workers, replied “The lawsuit has been filed.”
Exact numbers of cuts to the CDC are still being assessed. Dr. Debra Houry, who recently resigned as the agency’s chief science officer and deputy director of program and science, said that in January, the CDC had 13,674 employees. Before Friday’s cuts, there were 11,400. With about 1,100 projected cuts, it will be around 10,300, she said.
The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, which trains the agency’s celebrated “disease detectives,” lost at least 30 of its staff who coordinate the program, and 40 EIS officers who were in their second year of training, according to a second agency official who asked to not be named for fear of retaliation. The EIS had been spared in a previous round of cuts carried out in April.
More than 130 employees were laid off from the office of the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, which coordinated activities for the entire center, said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who recently resigned as the director of the NCIRD.
The layoffs come as the country is heading into the winter respiratory virus season – a time when infections such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza and Covid-19 cause a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. The cuts mean there will be fewer experts keeping tabs on the severity of the season and which cities and states are most impacted.
“The damage is beyond repair,” Daskalakis said. “Crippling CDC, even as a ploy to create political pressure to end the government shut down, means America is even less prepared for outbreaks and infectious disease security threats.”
All the staff at the agency’s the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a journal known as the MMWR that has published surveillance data on the nation’s health for more than a century, were also fired, according to Houry.
“It’s not radically transparent if the agency can’t communicate. Cutting things like MMWR will prevent scientists from communicating about urgent clinical and scientific issues,” Houry said.
There were also cuts to support staff, including people who arrange travel and security for CDC scientists working on international outbreaks. The agency’s Office of Safety Security and Asset Management was also impacted, despite staff there recently receiving praise for preventing a gunman from accessing the campus during shooting in August that killed DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose and left several campus buildings pocked with hundreds of bullet holes.
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