It was a strange weekend for employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to say the least. On Friday, hundreds of workers at the agency, many of whom have been furloughed since the federal government shut down on October 1, found out they were being fired as part of widespread layoffs across federal agencies.Less than a day later, a curt follow-up email landed in many of their inboxes informing them that they weren’t being let go after all. No clarification,no apology.Staffers spent the weekend trading calls and texts, trying to piece together who had been axed, who had been spared, and, most puzzling, why. “There’s really no strategy that they’re using, no real approach-at least any thoughtful approach-to how they are doing these cuts,” Daniel Jernigan, who directed the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic infectious Diseases before he resigned in August, told me.
I spoke wiht half a dozen current and former CDC officials, and foremost on their mind was what they described as the ineptitude of the botched downsizing. For example, almost all editors of the “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” which the CDC has published since 1960, were among those notified on Friday night that their work was “unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.” by Saturday, several CDC sources told me, they had their jobs back.
Andrew Nixon, the communications director for Health and Human Services, wrote in an email that “the employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force.” He declined to answer specific questions about layoffs.
Many of the cuts that have stuck so far seem to conflict with the administration’s stated aims. A branch of the National Center for Health statistics that coordinates an annual survey of the dietary habits of Americans-a topic presumably of interest to those attempting to make America healthy again-was eliminated,according to its former chief,David Woodwell. Secretary of Health and human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused the agency’s vaccine advisory board of being “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and insisted that such conflicts must be eliminated in order to restore Americans’ trust in the CDC.And yet, the agency’s human-resources office-which handled ethics issues-has been scrapped, according to Alt CDC, a team of anonymous public-health officials that has been crowdsourcing updates on the firings. “I would think, if you are monitoring for conflicts of interest, particularly when you’ve accused the agency of having them, you would want to have an office to do that,” Debra Houry, who was the CDC’s chief medical officer until she resigned in August, told me.
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