Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
The Trump administration carried out mass layoffs of federal public health officials Oct. 10 that experts warned would leave the US dangerously unprepared to handle disease outbreaks.
As reported by The New York Times Oct. 11, the layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were deep and wide-ranging, and included employees and leaders “in offices addressing respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, injury prevention, and global health.”
The administration laid off the entire CDC office in Washington, D.C., as well as the staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication founded in 1930 that has been credited with the first reporting in medical literature on the disease that would come to be known as AIDS in 1981.
In addition to this, several dozen Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, commonly known as “disease detectives” who track outbreaks across the world, received their termination notices, Bred Reed noted at Common Dreams (10/11).
Dr. Jeremy Foust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, reported in a post on his personal Substack newsletter that CDC insiders are estimating that “between 1,100 and 1,300 employees are being cut” by the Trump administration.
Other public health experts reacted with horror to news of the terminations.
Dr. Catharine Young, a senior fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, described the layoffs as a “Friday night massacre” and warned of severe repercussions for both US citizens and the entire world.
“This isn’t streamlining the government—it’s dismantling our ability to detect and respond to outbreaks before they spread,” she wrote in a post on X. “You can’t cut your way to safety.”
However, the Trump administration on the next day reversed about half of the layoffs at the CDC after hundreds of scientists received “incorrect notifications” that they were laid off during the government shutdown, NBC News reported Oct. 12, citing an official familiar with the matter.
“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,” the official told NBC News. “This was due to a glitch in the system.”
The reversed layoffs came just after the administration moved to lay off thousands of federal workers during the government shutdown, prompting backlash from critics who argue the layoffs are illegal.
The reduction-in-force moves are being challenged in court and mark the latest fallout from the government shutdown fight, which has stretched into its second week as lawmakers show no signs of moving closer to a deal.
