Trump administration lays off dozens of CDC officials

WASHINGTON — Dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including “disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists and the entire Washington office — were notified late Friday that they were losing their jobs as part of the Trump administration’s latest round of federal layoffs.

It was unclear Friday how many CDC workers were affected. But it was the latest blow to an agency that has been wracked by mass resignations, a shooting at its Atlanta headquarters in August and the firing of its director under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Layoff notices landed in the email inboxes of CDC employees shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern time Friday, notifying employees that their duties had been deemed unnecessary or “virtually identical” to those being performed elsewhere in the agency. Scientists, including leaders, in offices addressing respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, injury prevention and global health were among those affected.

The staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the journal that reports on health trends and emerging infectious threats, was also laid off. The publication’s storied history includes a June 1981 report that five previously healthy gay men were treated for an unusual pneumonia — the first hint of the AIDS epidemic.

Roughly 70 Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — the so-called “disease detectives” who respond to outbreaks around the globe — received layoff notices, according to a person familiar with them. The service was spared during an earlier round of layoffs in February.

An officer at an American Federation of Government Employees local union representing CDC employees said that the agency’s human resources staff, which had been furloughed as part of the government shutdown, had been called back to work to send out layoff notices to their colleagues.

The CDC layoffs are part of a round of cuts across the government to fulfill President Donald Trump’s threats to use the shutdown to shrink the federal government. But for the nation’s public health agency, which has been a primary target of Kennedy, they were the latest crisis in a year of upheaval.

In late August, just weeks after a gunman opened fire on the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta, Kennedy orchestrated the ouster of Susan Monarez, the agency’s new director, who had been in her job for less than a month.

Monarez later told Senate lawmakers that during a series of tense meetings with Kennedy, he called the CDC “the most corrupt federal agency” in the government, and accused its employees of “killing children.”

Trump has said there would be “a lot” of layoffs during the shutdown, and promised that the cuts would be “Democrat oriented.” The CDC has been the subject of intense criticism on the political right since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many Republicans accused the agency and its leaders of promoting strict vaccination guidelines and lockdowns, to which they objected.

Earlier on Friday, as part of a medical checkup at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Trump received a COVID booster shot and a flu vaccine, according to the White House.

Several CDC employees, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, described the mood Friday night as grim. Some noticed a pattern: This latest round of layoffs came on the eve of the Indigenous Peoples Day holiday weekend, while previous cuts to federal health agencies were announced on Valentine’s Day and April Fools’ Day.