Fired CDC staff say layoffs leave US 'dangerously unprepared' for future crises

Mennatalla Ibrahim, Baltimore Sun on Oct 14, 2025

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Recently fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees on Tuesday called the Trump administration’s recent mass layoffs an “intentional attack” on the agency and Americans’ health.

More than 1,300 CDC employees were abruptly terminated Friday, with about half reinstated within 24 hours. About 600 staffers remain dismissed, according to internal estimates, fulfilling the administration’s threats to slash government jobs during the ongoing shutdown.

Unions and court filings over the weekend indicate that an estimated 4,200 federal workers across at least seven agencies began receiving reduction-in-force notices on Friday. In addition to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the CDC’s parent agency, which lost more than 1,100 staffers, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Education, Treasury, Commerce, Energy, and Homeland Security departments also faced significant cuts.

The Tuesday press briefing was hosted by the National Public Health Coalition, a group of terminated CDC workers and public health allies founded by former CDC public health adviser Abigail Tighe. During the briefing, an anonymous CDC scientist who was terminated Friday described the day’s events as stressful but unsurprising.

“It’s been emotionally and mentally and physically exhausting. It’s like being in a strange game where there’s no rules and we don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said. “At this point … I’m pretty numb to it. I saw it coming. I wanted to stay as long as I could, but I knew they’d get me at some point.”

Tighe said many HHS employees were told the mass firing and rehiring stemmed from a technical coding error, but she and other former federal workers maintain that the terminations were deliberate. “These terminations were not a glitch,” she said. “It was not an innocent error.”

Former CDC officials John Brooks and Karen Remley warned that the cuts, especially to CDC, have eroded coordination between federal and state health departments, leaving the nation dangerously unprepared for future public health emergencies.

Tighe noted that about one-quarter of the agency’s workforce has been lost since the 2025 reduction-in-force process began, leaving few medical or public health professionals in leadership roles.

Among the CDC programs affected are the Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), as well as the agency’s Washington office, human resources and library divisions.

Maryland impact, building on earlier cuts

The CDC division of the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, which runs the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), lost all its staff on Friday, according to media reports. The office conducts research that guides public health policies on nutrition, oral health, and environmental risks.

NHANES is the nation’s main source of information on Americans’ health and nutrition, including birth and death rates, according to the National Library of Medicine. Brooks said it would be “very worrisome if these areas of vital statistics were lost.”

NCHS Director Brian Moyer did not respond to requests for comment. The National Public Health Coalition could not provide exact numbers of workers affected in this office or elsewhere in Maryland.

Remley warned that the local impact of cuts could be serious. “It has a significant ripple effect … you don’t know you need (public health) until you need it because it’s in the background,” she said. “All of those are eroded, and so I think at a state and local level, it’s very, very scary.”

Maryland had already lost about 12,700 federal jobs since the beginning of the second Trump administration, according to a state labor department spokesperson. HHS, which includes the CDC, accounted for the most layoffs in the first half of the year, primarily in Montgomery, Prince George’s and Baltimore counties, along with Baltimore City.

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