Workers, activists, community members protest ‘cruelty’ in CDC cuts

A current employee, who said she’d spent 10 years working with or for the CDC, said the level of confusion and threat to public health work from the administration was completely new.

“We’ve felt under attack or not fully supported in the past, but nothing like this,” said the employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“And the thing that drives me nuts about it is the whole idea that this is for efficiency or for saving money,” she said. Some of the probationary workers “are the best deal in government. Those are the folks who are just starting their careers. They’re not making these big salaries that people talk about on the news. They are scraping to do the good work because they care about it — and those are the people that got let go first.

For Deanna Amarosa, who worked in communications to prevent foodborne and waterborne threats to health, Tuesday was her first day in more than a year unable to walk inside. Amarosa said she started at the CDC in December 2023.

The layoff emails seemed written to arrive Friday. Instead, Amarosa’s email came during the federal holiday weekend, and when she went to open it when government reopened Tuesday she no longer had access.

“I can’t even open and read my own termination letter,” she said. That she spent all day and night Friday checking her email in vain but suspecting that she was fired — Valentine’s Day and night, she noted — “was just another level of evil.”

Amarosa said she was currently in the middle of a project interviewing health care workers about effectively communicating information on health threats to patients. She doubts anyone on her small team will be able to complete that project.

“The thousands of dollars that was put into these interviews, this research has been wasted now,” Amarosa said. “So if they really care about waste and making the government more efficient, then they wouldn’t be eliminating people’s work, or workers that were having the ability to actually make good on all the investment that we put into public health.”

The CDC employs approximately 13,000 people, the vast majority of them in metro Atlanta. The Trump administration last weekend fired approximately 10% of them. It targeted those on probation, a status for people hired or promoted within the last year or two that carries fewer job protections. Public health experts in contact with the CDC said there did not seem to be attention to what jobs people did, but rather who would be technically easiest to fire.

President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have said they are targeting waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. As news reports spread of the blanket firings, their aides continued to convey that message in response.

Over and over, CDC workers told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the rally and in other interviews of being fired with a letter alleging poor performance, as some of their bosses noted the employees were high performers or even cried with them. Several told the AJC the charge of poor performance came just a month after a stellar performance review of at least a count of 4 on a scale of 5, and in spite of awards for excellent performance.

Other workers and their supporters echoed feelings of dismay at the work they will no longer be able to do. Current employees said the chaos makes it hard to work.

Several wore masks to hide their faces or said they didn’t want to give their full names for fear of reprisals. As they spoke, drivers whizzed by honking in support, drawing smiles from the morose crowd. Across the street, a lone anti-vaccine protester stood shouting at them, displaying signs reading “Shame on CDC.” He comes daily, they said.

Another employee said she spent 10 years studying to become a scientist to serve the public.

“Watching that get gutted is really difficult,” she said.

“I am concerned about my livelihood. I’m concerned about the repercussions it’ll have for my family,” she said. She has not heard that she’ll be laid off. She has no reason to believe her job is safe, either.

“But on a larger scale, the ripple effects that this kind of loss will have for the American public is so terrifying. I work with people who are trying to protect the public from fentanyl overdoses. I work with people who are working to track foodborne illness spread before it kills a bunch of children. Like, these are services that we need.”