One year on, fired CDC workers looking forward
One year ago this week, hundreds of workers at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention watched their email accounts on Friday afternoon, having been told termination notices would go out then.
Nothing arrived that day, or that night, Valentine’s Day. Some of the employees went to dinner. Others stayed home to monitor email, relieved when nothing landed.
The notes mostly arrived the next day, on Saturday.
The firing of probationary workers, allegedly all for poor performance even though many had good or stellar employment reviews, was illegal and had to be redone. And eventually it was. That weekend launched a year of steep cutbacks and grant funding cuts — all of which were pockmarked by chaos and trauma.
On Tuesday, dozens of former CDC workers and their supporters gathered outside the agency’s Clifton facility to look forward.
“We want to build a system that’s better and works for everybody,” said Aryn Backus, who used to work on reducing the rising popularity of nicotine vaping among kids.
Their mood was different Tuesday: determined smiles on faces, no tears. One person is running for office.
Backus said she has been fired by the CDC three times, and none of them has held up in court. She’s still being paid, but for doing no agency work.
Instead, she helped form “Fired But Fighting” and the National Public Health Coalition, which supports the fired workers and tries to connect them to public health organizations with the goal of moving toward a new public health structure in the U.S.
“We recognize that the system that we had wasn’t perfect,” Backus said. “There’s a reason why it was so easy to break and why so many people didn’t think that it works for them.”
There is no official public tally of last year’s layoffs and forced retirements, but the workers’ union and advocates put it at least 3,000 of the 13,000-person workforce that began 2025.
“The fact that you don’t have a solid number is an indication of the chaotic approach to it,” said Dan Jernigan, one of three top leaders who publicly resigned last summer and attended Tuesday. “I don’t think they know, actually.”
A federal judge at the time, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, wrote that the Trump administration’s office doing the firings “does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency.”
Jernigan was told that week he would have to fire several top leaders under him. It emerged that the Trump administration had singled out people who were “probationary.” But probationary status at CDC was given to people who’ve been promoted, too, so Jernigan said he was being told to fire the directors over hospital safety and the Division of High Consequence Pathogens like Ebola.
There was no health strategy, just “mean-spirited” terminations, Jernigan said. “It’s the kind of thing that they actually enjoyed it,” he told the crowd.
Jernigan pointed to examples like the department’s secretary saying a top priority was environmental toxins, but then “he has all the people in the childhood lead program gone.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had just been sworn in as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at the time. His spokesperson gave The Atlanta Journal-Constitution a written response to the Tuesday demonstration that echoed previous statements.
“Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time, and he is committed to restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health through sustained reform,” Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said. “His focus is on returning the CDC to its core mission and ending the culture of insularity that has undermined public confidence.
“The CDC will continue to protect Americans from public health threats, guided by gold-standard science and common sense.”
One supporter who addressed the former CDC employees, Emory Epidemiology Department Professor and Senior Vice Chair Jodie Guest, said she teaches students who now think there is simply no stability in U.S. public health work. But she said their own students remain.
“They keep studying, they keep volunteering, they keep asking those hard questions that I remember asking: How do we build a healthier society? How do we protect our communities? How do we prevent the next crisis and not just respond to it,” Guest said.
“We have to continue to fight for a system strong enough to sustain them.”
About the Author
Ariel Hart is a reporter on health care issues. She works on the AJC’s health team and has reported on subjects including the Voting Rights Act and transportation.
