Layoffs began Friday on the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention.
David Goldman/AP
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David Goldman/AP
The Trump administration is slashing about 1,300 workers, or 10%, of the workforce on the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, in response to two company workers who requested anonymity as a result of they weren’t licensed to talk for the company. Workers had been notified Friday of the cuts.
The layoffs are focused at probationary workers — a broad class that features current hires and long-time staffers who had been lately moved to a brand new place within the CDC.
“That is completely tragic,” stated one present CDC worker. “If we lose these folks we lose essential capability and in a really actual sense we lose our CDC future.”
One other present CDC staffer advised NPR the cuts had been coming on the route of the Division of Well being and Human Companies — now below the management of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed as secretary on Thursday.
In response to a request for touch upon the cuts, Andrew Nixon, director of communications at HHS, wrote in an electronic mail to NPR: “HHS is following the Administration’s steering and taking motion to assist the President’s broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal authorities. That is to make sure that HHS higher serves the American folks on the highest and most effective normal.”
Dr. Georges Benjamin, government director of the American Public Well being Affiliation, says these cuts “are very harmful to the core infrastructure of public well being.”
“This occurs whenever you do indiscriminate, poorly thought-out layoffs,” he says.
The cuts additionally hit the Epidemic Intelligence Service officer corps, the place all these within the first 12 months of their service had been laid off, one of many CDC workers stated. Members of the service, whom the CDC calls “illness detectives,” are sometimes dispatched to analyze illness outbreaks and public well being threats within the U.S. and abroad.
Friday’s layoffs are the most recent in a sequence that began this week at CDC. Earlier this week, contractors in numerous divisions of the company had been let go, and round 400 workers accepted the “Fork within the Highway” supply, in response to a former CDC staffer with data of the scenario.
Have info you wish to share concerning the ongoing adjustments throughout the federal authorities? Attain out to those authors by way of encrypted communications: Will Stone @wstonereports.95 and Pien Huang @pienhuang.88
Edited by Carmel Wroth and Scott Hensley.
