Above photo: People demonstrate outside the main campus of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on April 1, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images.
“Our public health system is weaker than ever before,” said the union representing CDC workers.
Hundreds of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employees are losing their jobs after a federal judge ruled on August 12 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was barred from terminating employees at only six CDC divisions. The court’s prior ruling had protected all CDC staff.
The litigation stems from HHS Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s efforts to terminate thousands of HHS employees. In March, Kennedy announced that 10,000 of the department’s workers would be laid off, including 2,400 staff from the CDC. Kennedy, who has long peddled health disinformation to the public, has made numerous false claims about vaccines, COVID-19, chronic diseases, and autism.
Shortly after the layoffs were announced, Kennedy said that some people were mistakenly terminated, like the team that worked on preventing lead poisoning, and would be asked back. Court orders prevented the remaining layoffs from taking effect, but the recent federal court’s ruling cleared the way for at least 600 CDC employees to lose their jobs.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union representing more than 2,000 CDC workers, said in a statement on Wednesday that, “Due to a staggering lack of transparency from HHS, AFGE Local 2883 has not received formal notice of which groups are being separated today so we can’t even determine the full extent of everything being lost.”
“However, we know that America is less safe, our public health system is weaker than ever before, and our workforce is less capable of responding to public health threats,” the union continued.
Of those being laid off, the union said: “Some of the offices and divisions now being separated include the very groups that have worked to keep everyone safe from violence and injuries; to track and respond to HIV outbreaks; to form and strengthen public health partnerships to promote immunization; to conduct research and control costly chronic diseases debilitating millions of Americans like Alzheimer’s, Arthritis, oral health issues, and others.”
Among the CDC staff who lost their jobs were those who worked in violence prevention. The layoffs come after a gunman shot hundreds of rounds of bullets on the grounds of the CDC campus in Atlanta on August 8, killing DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose before he took his own life. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that the gunman “wanted to make the public aware of his public distrust of the vaccines.”
After the shooting, more than 750 former and current HHS staffers demanded that Kennedy stop spreading lies about vaccines.
“The attack came amid growing mistrust in public institutions, driven by politicized rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization — and now, violence,” they wrote in a letter to Kennedy and members of Congress. “Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information[.]”
Kennedy’s “dangerous and deceitful statements and actions have contributed to the harassment and violence experienced by CDC staff,” the staffers went on.
In another statement released after the shooting, former CDC staff, including those who worked in the department’s Division of Violence Prevention, called on public health leaders to “protect the people who protect the public. The safety of our communities, our colleagues and our country depends on it.”
“As former scientists and public health professionals in CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, our mission was to prevent this exact kind of harm,” they wrote. “The irony is devastating: the very experts trained to understand, interrupt and prevent this kind of violence were among those whose jobs were eliminated in the April 1 federal government reduction-in-force.”
