On Aug. 8, a gunman sprayed hundreds of bullets at buildings on the agency’s main campus in Atlanta, killing a responding police officer. A little over a week later, the Trump administration sent permanent termination notices to hundreds of employees.
Agency staff who spoke to The Hill said morale is at rock bottom, and the latest round of layoffs hit especially hard following the revelations that the attacker was motivated by his distrust of COVID-19 vaccines.
“The shooting feels like a violent manifestation of the hatred that we've been subjected to for the last seven months, and then losing many staff right after that is really just the cherry on top of all the trauma that we've been experiencing,” said one current employee who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The layoffs had been anticipated, but coming so soon after the attack caught people by surprise. Without warning, people started losing access to agency systems as early as last Saturday.
One former employee said they had been on administrative leave since February; still getting paid, but unable to go to work. They were officially laid off this week.
“We didn't all get notices. Some people had some trickling in through email ... and there's some people who still haven't gotten anything. It's all just very messy and chaotic and not organized,” the former employee said.
Adding to the frustration and anger: Many of the people who were fired this week worked in the division of violence prevention.
“Just days after a domestic terrorist attack that we know was in part, caused by mental health challenges and access to automatic weapons, and that is the work that the people who were [fired] were doing ... all of that was just erased,” the employee said.
Another agency staffer said it felt like the administration has done a textbook job of dismantling the agency through thousands of small cuts. There’s still a hiring freeze, employees can’t travel and it’s unclear what level of funding CDC will get for the next fiscal year.
“Since January, I just feel completely useless, like I'm completely wasting my career right now,” another employee said. “I certainly feel like I had my dream job, and that has just been ripped out from under all of us.”
But despite the frustration, agency staff have started speaking up and fighting back.
“When you are literally shot at, and then many people lose their jobs ... it's a message and a signal that we don't have anybody protecting us or standing up for us, at least at the highest levels of leadership, and all we have ourselves,” a current employee said. "More people are finding their voice because they have nothing to lose, especially if they just lost their job.”
More than 750 current and former employees sent Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a letter Wednesday calling on him to stop “spreading inaccurate health information” and do more to protect public health professionals in the wake of the shooting.
HHS pushed back, citing Kennedy’s visit to CDC and said he “is standing firmly with CDC employees—both on the ground and across every center—ensuring their safety and well-being remain a top priority.”
“Any attempt to conflate widely supported public health reforms with the violence of a suicidal mass shooter is an attempt to politicize a tragedy,” the agency said in a statement.
