Four days after the Trump administration initiated a wave of layoffs across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there’s still no official accounting of how many people were eliminated.
Current and former staff, as well as members of the union representing CDC employees at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, have been crowdsourcing data from impacted employees to estimate the exact number of people and positions that have been cut.
Leaders of AFGE Local 2883 told reporters Tuesday they have not received notifications of the positions or units that were impacted.
“All of the information that we are sharing is from our membership, from our colleagues, from members of our community, as we are trying to piece together for ourselves a picture of what is happening,” a union member said.
More than a thousand people received layoff notices Friday, including employees who produce the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report publication, people working on chronic disease research, and people tracking and responding to the measles outbreak.
HHS said many of those people were fired in error and quickly moved to bring them back beginning on Saturday.
In an updated court filing, HHS said it initially sent reduction in force (RIF) notices to approximately 1,760 employees on Friday. But due to what the agency said were “data discrepancies and processing errors” the notices should have only gone to 982 people.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon declined to comment on more specifics about which HHS agencies saw layoffs or how many employees were affected.
According to the unofficial estimates, about 600 CDC employees remained out of work, even after the rescinded notices.
“These illegal firings of our union members during a federal government shutdown is a callous attack on hard working Americans and puts the livelihoods, health and safety of our members and communities at great risk,” AFGE Local 2883 president Yolanda Jacobs said Tuesday.
The layoffs also hit non-scientific workers, including IT support and human resources staff, who were brought back from furlough just to email out layoff notices to employees— themselves included.
CDC library staff and museum staff, who current and former employees said are crucial for supporting research and communicating to the public about what the agency does, were fired.
CDC also no longer has any employees in its Washington office, meaning there are no easy lines of communication to lawmakers.
“CDC has worked directly with Congress for decades to help constituents by providing data, expertise and insight when needed. These firings mean Congress no longer has a means of direct access to the agency it funds when it needs information or briefings,” said John Brooks, who most recently served as the chief medical officer of the division of HIV Prevention before he retired from the agency last year.
“Every American is less safe when their duly elected federal representative has their access to information affecting health restricted,” Brooks told reporters.
CDC started the year with over 13,000 employees, and the Trump administration has systematically eliminated about 3,000 through direct layoffs or buyouts, according to union estimates— 24 percent of the total workforce.
However, there are an additional 1,300 CDC employees who are on administrative leave due to attempted RIFs that were temporarily blocked by a court. They are still being paid but are not allowed to work.
All told, the agency has lost about 4,300 employees this year, a reduction of about a third.