As the Trump administration cuts more government jobs, hundreds of CDC “disease detectors” are being let go.
Last week, the administration told CDC leaders that it was going to lay off up to 10% of its staff, focussing on government probationary workers.
On Saturday, the Trump administration fired hundreds of people from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Two sources inside the agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said that the employees included fellows who were in charge of important public health jobs.
About twenty of them were part of the Laboratory Leadership Service (LLS), a group whose job it is to train people who work in public health labs and help with outbreak reaction. The two-year internship program began in 2015 and is mainly about making sure labs are safe and following the rules.
LLS workers were fired due to poor performance, despite having “excellent” performance reviews, according to a middle-level CDC official, with a new slogan promoting “the disease detectors.”
A bigger sister program at the CDC, called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), or “disease detectives” as they are sometimes called, was also expected to lose a lot of funding. But as of Sunday, the two officers who talked to NBC News had not heard that anyone had been fired at EIS. One, a top CDC official, said that by Sunday, everyone who was going to be fired had been told.
“Even if EIS was spared, there are multiple other fellowships that were not, and that’s a pipeline for the next generation of CDC leaders,” he said. “They’re cutting us off at the knees. It will hurt public health for decades to come.
The Presidential Management Fellows program, which tries to train future public health leaders, and the Public Health Associate Program, which places fellows with local health agencies, were also cut, the two officials said.
It has been chaotic and hard to understand how the firing process has been going.
The Office of Personnel Management told CDC leaders almost two weeks ago to look through a list of employees on probation or a limited-term contract, such as new directors, fellows, and highly skilled noncitizen scientists, and decide whether each one was “must be retained,” “mission critical,” or “not mission critical.CDC officials claim lists were not used for terminations, but White House, CDC, and Department of Health did not respond promptly. LLS students test for dengue and Oropouche.In 2020, the group handled Covid-19 tests for tens of thousands of people in Arizona.
The LLS fellows who were fired said that their coworkers were more worried about what the changes meant for public health than about their jobs.
“Many of us could have gone to jobs that paid more,” the fellow, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to risk their remaining weeks of paid leave, said. “We could have worked for a drug company.” We could have made a lot more money if we had worked for science or something. We all care deeply about public health, though, and only want it to succeed.
The messages of dismissal came the day after the Trump administration told CDC leaders that they were going to fire about 1,300 probationary workers, which is about 10% of the whole staff.
The cuts were made as part of the administration’s greater plan to reduce the size of the federal workforce, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of the CDC.
“HHS is following the Administration’s lead and doing things to help the President’s larger plans to reorganise and streamline the government.” “This is to make sure that HHS better serves the American people in the best and most efficient way possible,” wrote Andrew Nixon, who is in charge of marketing for the department.
The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have made a lot of cuts to the federal government. Last week, officials from the Office of Personnel Management told leaders of federal agencies to fire probationary employees. This could affect hundreds of thousands of people. At least some probationary workers have been sent notices by the Veterans Affairs and Transportation departments since the order was sent out.