As the chaotic cycle of firings and an occasional reprieve continues at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a freight train of grief, trauma, relief and unease has run through the lives of its workers and their families.
The Trump administration, led by Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk, says it is looking to cut costs by rooting out waste and fraud. Critics charge that cuts to the public health workforce so far have been indiscriminate, wasteful and cruel. The administration has attempted to walk back some specific firings after public outcry.
Several CDC workers, their loved ones and people training with the goal of working at the CDC have spoken to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in recent weeks about their experiences. Fearing for their job security given the widespread layoffs that have affected hundreds of thousands of federal employees, they asked not to be named.
Two weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that the way DOGE chose whom to fire was probably illegal. Last week about 180 CDC workers got their jobs back — for now. The reprieve came by email to the fired workers and said: “After further review and consideration … you should return to duty under your previous work schedule. We apologize for any disruption this may have caused.”
While some felt relief, workers who heard the news said they suspect the administration is only going to fire those people again, after figuring out how to do it legally.
The Associated Press and other news outlets report that the CDC and other agencies are preparing for their largest cuts yet.
“I just think people are like, kind of hopeless,” said one public health trainee in her 20s who has applied to the CDC, and who has friends who got job offers there. She is in graduate school and wants to work in public service.
“I think it’s hard to be able to trust that anything is going to be permanent. It seems like every 24 hours, there’s a new news headline regarding change in administrative plans,” she said.
“I think that they’re making a lot of irrational cuts that they’re not really thinking about the consequences to the community.”
In any case, few believe last week’s reprieve will be the last word, or that calm is on the horizon.
The chaos is devastating, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.
“The field of preparedness is really incompatible with this level of chaos,” Nuzzo said, speaking with reporters on a virtual panel last week.
“The cuts that we’re talking about are people,” she said.
Referring to the USDA bird flu workers who were fired and the resultant public outcry, she added: “I know they’re trying to hire them back. Last I saw is that they may not be able to get them back.
“You know, even if somebody gets cut and then they get reoffered a job to come back, just think about what that means for the morale, what that means for someone’s abilities to kind of put their all into the job.”
The CDC already started out in a state weakened by COVID-19 departures, as public health workers left under exhaustion and stress from the politicization of their jobs, Nuzzo said.
“We were starting from a very weak place,” Nuzzo said. “And now what we’re seeing is, I think, a real kind of make-or-break moment for the workforce.”
NBC News reporter Natasha Korecki interviewed federal workers, including veterans’ mental health workers, and found them affected not just by the seemingly random cuts but also by the message that the workers are useless, such as social media posts by Elon Musk showing disdain for the work they do. The workers “told of overwhelming stress, personal crises, suicidal ideation, rapid weight loss, prolonged lack of sleep, panic attacks and visiting the emergency room after a mental breakdown,” the story found.
The public health trainee interviewed by the AJC, a metro Atlanta resident, said she had twice applied for a vaunted CDC fellowship and viewed it as “the pinnacle” position for the type of public service health work she wants to do. She called it “the best of the best.”
Now, she said she would have to think hard about whether to accept the job if it were offered. She still might, she said, if it were her only option.
“I think, with the uncertainty of being a federal employee and the lack of clear direction for where things are heading, it does not seem like … a wagon I want to hitch my ride to.”
The woman said a friend did get the position, then was summarily fired after moving to another state where she had planned to work supporting a local health department.
“For that to just, in an email, be ripped out from under her?” the woman said. “The amount of time that we spend training to become experts in epidemiology disease response, for that just to be taken away is really devastating.”
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