On Monday, October 13, the senior leaders of several national associations of professionals concerned with infectious disease control and public health excoriated officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for their handling of staffing issues over the past weekend, charging that the staffing chaos was undermining the protection of public health in the United States.
The leaders’ criticism came in response to the layoffs of more than 1,300 staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 700 of which were apparently reversed two days later. The CDC staffers had received layoff notices on Friday, October 10, with 700 of the 1,300 who received those notices receiving notices canceling their firings, on Sunday, October 12
The statement, published to the website of the Arlington, Va.-based Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) on Monday, began thus: “The unprecedented mass firing of more than 1,100 federal employees, and then rehiring of some, at the Department and Health and Human Services was a completely reckless act that may compromise the health of all Americans. The initial targeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s core functions and scientific leadership will cripple the agency that keeps our country safe by monitoring and preventing disease and saving lives in every community across the country.” I t was signed by Tina Tan, M.D., president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America; Collen Kelley, M.D., M.P.H., chair of the HIV Medicine Association; William J. Steinbach, M.D., president of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society; and David J. Weber, president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.
“Uncertainty around which staff have been fired or rehired leaves health professionals and the public in a state of complete confusion about which longstanding public health services they can rely upon,” the statement continued. “For nearly eight decades, CDC has worked around the clock to protect Americans from a growing range of health threats from rabies to food safety to Ebola. The agency’s support of state and local health departments and health care professionals is the backbone of our nation’s public health response. Even prior to the latest round of layoffs, clinicians across the country reported dangerous interruptions in access to services including laboratory testing, public reporting and expert analyses of outbreak data and publication of clinical guidelines, all of which directly impact patient care. Additional layoffs will further erode CDC’s ability to perform essential duties and put our country’s health at risk,” it continued.
“If the gutting of our public health infrastructure and workforce is allowed to continue, Americans will be sicker, health care costs will rise and many more people will die from preventable illnesses. We call for the reversal of these dangerous firings, and for Congress to move quickly to pass full-year spending bills that ensure that proposed cuts to public health are averted and federal appropriations are spent as Congress intended for the health and security of our nation,” the statement concluded.
Quoting mainstream media reports, Healthcare Innovation reported the confusion inside the CDC in its Sunday evening report. One of the mainstream journalists who has been focused on the issues inside the CDC has been MSNBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, who wrote on Sunday that “MSNBC spoke with eight current and former CDC officials, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation against themselves or their remaining colleagues. The emails alerting staffers came late Friday night, but current and former employees said CDC staffers had been bracing for layoffs since President Donald Trump signaled that he would use mass reductions in force as a way to punish Democrats for the ongoing shutdown, caused by a budget standoff between Republicans and Democrats. Notification that they’d lost their jobs came even as the human resources professional tasked with implementation had been furloughed as part of the shutdown. Several current and former officials said they initially believed the cuts — like other chaotic firings that were later walked back — might not be permanent. And there is a question about the legality of all employee firings during the shutdown. And, indeed, following publication of this article, many fired employees began receiving emails with the subject line, ‘Recession of Previous Notice of Reduction in Force,’ communicating that that despite the earlier notice, they would no longer be fired. An HHS official who declined to be named because he was not approved to speak on the issue, told MSNBC that around half of the firings had been done in error.”
And Zadrozny quoted Detre Daskalakis, M.D., the former director of the CDC’s National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who was one of four very senior CDC officials who resigned in August after then-Director Susan Monarez, Ph.D., was forced out, as saying that “CDC is over. It was killed. This administration only knows how to break things. They have made America at risk for outbreaks and attacks by nefarious players. People should be scared.”
And the New York Times’s Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg had reported on Saturday that, “Among the workers whose firings were revoked were members of the elite corps of ‘disease detectives’ who are typically deployed to the sites of outbreaks. The team that puts together the M.M.W.R., which communicates the agency’s recommendations and research, has also been brought back.”
