Washington — A scientist laid off by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “the everyday American should be very concerned” by reductions in force amid the government shutdown.
The scientist, one of hundreds of CDC employees terminated by the Trump administration last week, asked that her identity be concealed for fear of retribution.
“It’s going to mean more deaths, more preventable deaths,” she told CBS News on Wednesday of the layoffs. “People will absolutely die from the impact of this administration.”
The scientist worked at the CDC for the past decade, studying chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
She spoke out the same day a federal judge in Northern California issued a verbal order temporarily halting all the government layoffs that were issued since the shutdown began. This was in response to a lawsuit brought by federal employees’ unions.
“They went in and fired entire programs, even statutorily mandated by law programs, they cut entirely,” she said. “So there is no staff to do this work anymore.”
She said everything she was working on has come to a complete stop.
“It’s truly like an episode of ‘Squid Games,’ because we don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said.
The Trump administration has used the government shutdown, now in its third week, to lay off more than 4,000 federal workers, and plans to go further, according to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“I think we’ll probably end up being north of 10,000,” Vought said Wednesday during an appearance on “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
Since last week, the Trump administration has informed approximately 600 CDC employees they have been laid off.
On Tuesday, internal CDC officials not authorized to speak to the media told CBS News that on Oct. 10, about 1,000 CDC employees were initially given reduction-in-force notices, a government term for layoffs.
However, within about 24 hours, hundreds of those notices were rescinded, reducing the total number of layoffs in the agency since Oct. 10 to about 600, the officials said.
The judge’s ruling Wednesday would put the layoffs of those 600 employees on hold, leaving them in limbo while the case plays out.
According to numbers provided by a congressional source familiar with the cuts, the 600 CDC layoffs impacted all staff in the CDC’s offices in Washington, D.C., all staff for the office of the director for the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, all staff for the National Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Public Health Infrastructure and Workforce, and all policy and communications staff for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
The CDC agencies that saw their layoffs rescinded, according to the source, were the Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Center, the Global Health Center, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report team, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and scientists working on responses to outbreaks of measles in the U.S. and Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
So far this year, the CDC has lost about 3,000 employees to resignations and layoffs, or just under a quarter of its staff, according to AFGE Local 2883, the union that represents CDC employees. That number was confirmed by the CDC officials who spoke to CBS News.
The CDC has been beset by changes since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this year. A vaccine skeptic, Kennedy controversially replaced all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, a panel that makes vaccine recommendations.
And in August, less than a month after being confirmed by the Senate as CDC director, Susan Monarez was fired from her post over what she said was pressure from Kennedy to rubber-stamp his vaccine directives, later testifying before the Senate that Kennedy’s demands were “inconsistent with my oath of office and the ethics required of a public official.” Her firing also prompted several top CDC officials to resign in protest.
Kennedy, in his own Senate testimony last month, denied that he pressured Monarez to preapprove vaccination recommendations. He told senators that when he asked Monarez if she was “a trustworthy person,” she responded, “no.”
The congressional source also confirmed that among the permanent layoffs in HHS last week were 41 people in the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, an agency under the U.S. Public Health Service whose staff works in biodefense, as well as monitors data on natural disasters, infectious disease outbreaks and cyberattacks on hospitals.
An HHS spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday that the department’s layoffs are part of an effort to cut a “bloated bureaucracy,” and that the positions were deemed “non-essential by their respective divisions.”
“HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
But the scientist who spoke to CBS News said the turmoil inside the CDC will impact responses to disease outbreaks, like the measles outbreak in South Carolina, where five new cases were reported Tuesday, bringing the total to 16 since July, and forcing 139 students into quarantine, according to health officials.
“The surge capacity of the CDC is going to be significantly hampered with these cuts,” the scientist told CBS News. “It’s going to impede our ability to respond to public health outbreaks, just when all of these threats are on the rise.”
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