Nearly a quarter of staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been removed from the agency through reduction in force (RIF) notices this year, according to the union representing federal workers.
With the most recent round of layoffs this past weekend, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2883 estimates roughly 3,000 of the more than 13,000 employees that the CDC had at the start of the year have received RIF notices.
“Approximately 600 of those workers were separated in the April 1 RIF,” the union said. The remainder, about 2,400, “were illegally fired because of their probationary status,” meaning they had been newly hired or promoted, or “were pushed out through other pressure campaigns,” such as “forced retirement, deferred resignation program, [or] non-renewal of term employees.” The union said Tuesday that amounts to a reduction in force of about 23 percent.
AFGE Local 2883 represents CDC employees in the Atlanta metropolitan area and in Miami.
According to attorneys for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), about 1,760 department employees received RIF notices last week, but many of those were erroneous and immediately rescinded. They put the final RIF tally at 982 employees.
Even following rescinded RIF notices, AFGE Local 2883 estimated 600 CDC employees were laid off.
About 1,300 additional employees are on paid administrative leave due to attempted RIFs. According to the union, this effectively means a third of the CDC’s workforce has been removed from work.
“These illegal firings of our union members during a federal government shutdown is a callous attack on hardworking Americans and puts the livelihoods, health, and safety of our members and communities at great risk,” AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said in a briefing.
Former CDC staffers said they feel unduly targeted by the federal layoffs.
“It was heartbreaking and devastating, having been here for over two decades, to see this happening and realize that they were actually dismantling us,” one former staffer said. They described how they reached out to senior management for answers, who in turn reached out to human resources officials at the CDC only to learn that they too had been laid off.
Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases who resigned in protest earlier this year, said in a briefing Wednesday that those administrative staffers are equally as crucial to the agency’s public health mission.
Using the example of the CDC’s measles program staffers who were laid off and then recalled, Daskalakis said other staffers who weren’t recalled are still needed in an emergency response.
“We pull from the data office, we pull from human resources, we pull from the [Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics], and these are all offices that have been affected. So in effect, what that means is that the measles response has been impacted,” Daskalakis said.
