The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is offering buyouts and early retirement packages to 106 employees in the office of CDC Director Julie Gerberding, the Atlanta-based agency announced this week.

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The move seeks to reshape the director's office to focus more on leadership and less on operations, CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Wednesday.

The director's office staff grew by more than 40 percent during Gerberding's controversial agency-wide reorganization, begun in 2003, called the Futures Initiative. Before the reorganization, the office had about 1,200 employees. It now has about 1,700, Skinner said.

While the staff reduction incentives are being offered to positions that include certain administrators, accountants and lawyers, some medical officer and public health adviser positions also are eligible.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warned in a report last month that the CDC will face challenges replacing retiring medical officers and other similar positions due to a national shortage of public health professionals. More than one-quarter of the CDC's workers are eligible to retire in the next five years, the GAO said.

Given concerns about a loss of critical expertise as aging federal employees retire at increasing rates, the buyouts are "baffling" to Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the public health watchdog group Trust for America's Health.

"There's been a particular concern at CDC about a brain drain," Levi said. Between 2004 and 2006, in the wake of Gerberding's reorganization, all but two of the directors of CDC's eight primary scientific centers left the agency, along with other high-profile leaders and scientists.

Skinner said the buyouts and early retirement offers are part of a larger plan to reduce the director's office staff by 15 percent. There is no threat of involuntary layoffs, he said, and those who don't leave may be moved to other program areas within the agency.

The CDC has about 9,000 federal employees and about 5,000 contract workers, most of them based in Atlanta.

Under federal early-out programs, agencies offer early retirement at reduced annuity payments to employees age 50 and above with at least 20 years of service or to employees at any age with at least 25 years of service.

To receive a buyout, employees must work in certain jobs and have a minimum of three years continuous service with CDC or another branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The maximum amout of the taxable, lump-sum buyouts being offered is $25,000, but will vary based on the employee's years of service.

"Folks getting the buyouts have to figure out: Is it worth, after taxes, $15,000 or so to voluntarily give up my job," said John Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington-based group that examines federal workforce issues. Early retirements can be attractive to employees interested in pursuing a second career, he said.

Such voluntary staff reductions, first authorized in 2002, have been increasingly used by federal agencies, to either avoid involuntary staff reductions or allow them to reshape the skills of their workforces.

A 2006 GAO audit, found that during fiscal years 2003-2005, 51 federal agencies had used buyouts and "early-out" offers to reduce their workforces by 22,600 employees.

This is the fifth time CDC has offered voluntary separation incentives since 2003, though all of the earlier offers were made agency wide. Previous offers resulted in 375 employees leaving, the bulk of them —332 — in 2005, Skinner said.

Eligible CDC employees can apply for the current separation packages beginning Monday and those who are approved will leave the agency's employment rolls between Oct. 1 and Dec. 6.