In a post earlier today, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote about some of the awful things this administration is doing, saying, “Most Americans abhor what they see, because what they see is abhorrent.”
Truly, what’s happening to the civil servants who’ve dedicated whole careers to trying to make the world a better place is abhorrent. If you hear “federal worker” and you think “annoying bureaucrat who doesn’t know and doesn’t care and doesn’t want to help me,” then I’m sorry you’ve had those experiences (honestly, we all have) but that is NOT the vast majority of people whose careers are being destroyed in the federal government. These people you’re picturing aren’t the highly trained experts at CDC or NIH who are receiving notice of their immediate dismissal.
Saying someone is being RIFd—pronounced “riffed”—makes it sound far too insignificant, if you ask me. On the surface, being RIFd means you’re “fired but not because of your performance, just because we’re seeing the need for a Reduction In Force.” But the way it’s experienced is, “You may think you’ve been doing something important with your life, but it doesn’t matter, and the people you’ve been caring about don’t matter, and YOU don’t matter, so go away immediately.’”
And why is this happening? If you believe it’s in order to reduce waste and streamline our bureaucracy—or worse, to “restore trust”—than please hear me when I say you’ve been misled. It’s happening because this administration is playing political games. They’re wanting to show how much power they have, and to test the limits of their power. And clearly they’re comfortable being cruel to people who’ve dedicated their lives to a career of helping others. I hope you are able to see how abhorrent this is.
If you don’t work in public health (and don’t ever look at the news, ever?) you might not know what’s been happening this weekend, so let me explain.
Friday night the Trump administration decided to make good on their promise to fire more federal workers en masse if Democrats didn’t cave to Republican terms in order to end the government shutdown. And yes, just to be extra, extra mean, they waited until after 5pm on the Friday of a long weekend, which they knew would maximize chaos and minimize people’s ability to share information and get support while going through a devastating firing.
My phone first started buzzing around 4:30 Pacific Time, with sketchy details and lists of the divisions of CDC that had been decimated. Not being a CDC employee myself, to be honest it’s hard to follow all the acronyms. NCIRD/OD: Policy; GHC/ADP; OPHDST…my eyes were swirling, but the people who work there immediately understood the horror that was unfolding. Within a few hours my email inbox was flooded with people replying to colleagues on listservs, trying desperately to find answers and confirm details about what, or more precisely who, was suddenly gone.
By early Saturday afternoon in Atlanta, the New York Times, STAT News, and others were already starting to report on some of the absurd choices being made in the firings:
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All the civilian members of the 2023 and 2024 class of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS officers)—these are the elite “disease detectives” who CDC deploys when there is an outbreak. (Only civilian members because some are Commissioned Corps, who are uniformed officers and can’t just be RIFd.)
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Essentially the entire staff of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is a weekly publication that CDC uses to widely and freely share information about disease outbreaks in the US, usually before the information appears anywhere else.
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Athalia Christie, “incident commander” of the US measles response, who had nearly 30 years of experience managing outbreaks, including Ebola.
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The team currently working to control an active Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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A number of long-time staff members of the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens. I mean, are you kidding me? If there’s anyone who should be highest priority for keeping their jobs, it’s the experts at CDC with jobs in a division devoted to “high consequence pathogens.” Their website says “The Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology (DHCPP) works to protect the public from deadly infectious diseases.”
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CDC’s entire Global Health Center, which, well, deals with health issues globally. On their website it says they work “on the frontlines of global health security to create a safer America and a safer world.” Who needs that? They also work with PEPFAR to help end the global HIV epidemic.
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All the personnel in CDC’s Washington DC office, which are the people who meet with other HHS departments (since only CDC is based in Atlanta), meet with the Department of State for PEPFAR, brief staffers in Congress or the White House.
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The Office of the Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (yes, the people in charge of our vaccine access).
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Much of the Office of Science, which gathers information on global health threats so we can be prepared to respond early and protect the US (and people in other countries, of course).
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Much of the Division of Workforce Development, which trains and otherwise supports scientists at CDC and throughout more than 100 state, territorial, local, and tribal health departments.
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The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which helps manage public health emergencies and, you know, forecast when something bad is about to happen. In this case they didn’t eliminate the whole center, they just dissolved the Division of Technology and Innovation. I can’t imagine they were doing anything with technology…right?
But then before we even had time to confirm the details of what had happened and who was actually gone, word started to spread that some people were getting emails letting them know their RIF notice was being rescinded. Oops! Didn’t mean to fire you. Please report back to work Tuesday. (After Columbus Day, of course, when everyone is expected to work with the Trump administration to “reclaim [Columbus’s] extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”)
Suddenly the NY Times and STAT News were updating the original posts at the same URLs, changing from “It’s a massacre’: CDC battered by government shutdown firings” to “CDC battered by government shutdown firings, while some are rescinded,” and from “C.D.C. Layoffs Included 2 Top Measles Experts Amid Rising Cases” to “Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Scores of C.D.C. Experts Fired in Error.”
Apparently the folks at the MMWR were fired “because of coding errors in their job classifications.” The Epidemic Intelligence Service officers were also told they weren’t RIFd after all…at least the 2024 class got that message (unclear for 2023). Athalia Christie and the people working on Ebola in the DRC, those were mistakes, too. Many people in the Division of Workforce Development and the Global Health Center also appear to have received emails rescinding their RIF notice. According to the American Union of Federal Employees, 1,300 people at CDC received a RIF notice on Friday night, and 700 of them were reinstated Saturday. That’s great news, but 600 people (just about half of the giant group of people whose jobs were slashed) are still out of work.
If you feel frustrated that I just made you read through that whole list of people who got RIFd Friday and got you all worked up about dangerous decisions that turned out to not even be real, well, welcome to our world. This was real, and then it wasn’t. Which sure, brings relief. But as the folks at Alt National Park Service commented late Saturday, “Nothing boosts morale quite like being accidentally fired.” This isn’t being done to be responsible and thoughtful. It’s being done to be mean.
Feel angry and want to do something about it? I encourage you to make a donation to the mutual aid fund that CDC workers have set up for their colleagues who have, indeed, been RIFd for no good reason: https://www.cdcresourceportal.org. They’ve organized it so your donation will be tax-deductible. But more importantly, you’ll be showing these CDC workers that you care about them and what they’ve been doing, which—besides the money to help pay their bills and support their families—is something they really need right now. More than 99 cents of every dollar you donate will go directly to CDC workers who have been dismissed by these RIFs.
I’ll leave you with a brief anecdote from my own life:
Last night I was on a 15-hour flight from Washington DC to Cape Town. In our little row 31, it was me at the window, and two strangers. On the aisle was a woman who has spent the last 10 years consulting with community organizations in South Africa that have a focus on women escaping gender-based violence, people in extreme poverty, and children’s education programs in rural areas. She worked in tech prior to this but left the bougie tech world to apply her skills to areas where they could make the most difference, so she helps organizations upgrade their tech infrastructure or implement technology solutions to be able to serve more people, or serve them more efficiently and effectively. She was coming here so often she had bought a small apartment in Cape Town, to use as a home base. Unfortunately almost everyone she’s worked with received funding from USAID and now the orgs are closing altogether, or struggling with basics and not able to think about technology, so her work has dried up. She is on her way back to sell the apartment and is trying to figure out whether she can refocus her skills at home in the U.S. (where unfortunately so much public health and education infrastructure is being destroyed that she’s likely to face the exact same problem).
In the middle was a guy who works in “celebrity management” and gleefully told us one of the people he works for forgot a piece of luggage, so he is flying to Cape Town to hand-deliver it, stay one night and then fly back home again, on a very expensive last-minute ticket. He drank 5 little bottles of Jack Daniels with dinner, “Because hey, I can expense whatever I want!”
These are the times we’re living in. This isn’t how a society should be.
We deserve better.