Hundreds of fired CDC workers' fates hang in the balance after a week of chaos

After a week of chaos and confusion, as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees described it, the fates of more than 600 workers hang in the balance now that a federal judge has temporarily blocked their terminations.

The saga began on Friday, when around 1,300 employees at the CDC were told they had been let go. Less than a day later, around 700 of them were told that they had received the notices in error. The rest seemed to be out of a job until Wednesday, when the judge ordered the Trump administration not to fire any additional workers during the government shutdown, and not to enforce the terminations carried out since last week.

All this has played out while many CDC employees remain furloughed.

The Trump administration did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the ruling, which came in response to a lawsuit filed by two labor unions representing federal employees. A hearing is scheduled for later this month.

The more than 600 CDC employees whose firings were not rescinded include some staffers who managed the agency’s chronic disease programs — a research area Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to prioritize — as well as others who worked on a key survey measuring the health and nutrition of the U.S. population, according to a union representing CDC workers, an advocacy group of former agency staffers, and several current and former employees familiar with the matter. The group also includes some mental health professionals within the agency who had supported staff after the August shooting at CDC headquarters.

The layoffs happened “across the board, across multiple programs, particularly in communication, policy and operations,” said a spokesperson for the union, American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883.

The Trump administration tied the firings to the shutdown.

“Certain HHS employees received reduction-in-force notices as a direct consequence of the Democrat-led government shutdown,” Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement ahead of the judge’s ruling.

“HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy, growing its budget by 38% and its workforce by 17%. All HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions,” he said.

Nixon disputed reports from the union and former CDC employees that some staffers working on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey had been fired. He said HHS had rescinded those terminations.

The cuts came as Kennedy continues to reshape HHS. As health secretary, he has fired the CDC director — just 29 days after the Senate confirmed her — halted work on mRNA vaccines and moved to drastically downsize and restructure his department’s agencies.

Friday’s layoffs (the ones not rescinded) hit some CDC workers who helped handle requests from states to investigate urgent public health problems, such as overdose and drowning deaths, according to an agency employee familiar with the matter.

Also fired was much of the agency’s human resources staff; its entire Washington office, which communicates with Congress; and its ethics office, which reviews conflicts of interest for CDC leaders and advisory committee members.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned in August as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said losing the ethics office means reduced oversight over the agency’s vaccine advisory panel. Kennedy fired the panel’s previous members in June and appointed new ones, many of whom have expressed skepticism about Covid vaccines.

“I, as now an external person to CDC, have concerns that these folks have baseline conflicts of interest,” Daskalakis said Wednesday on a press call hosted by Defend America Action, a nonprofit that opposes the Trump administration’s policies. “We’ll never know because they’re not going to be assessed anymore by the ethics office. So that’s another pretty significant red flag.”

Former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis speaks to the media during a protest on Aug. 28.Alyssa Pointer / Reuters

The CDC bore a large share of the “reductions in force” that the Trump administration announced on Friday, when more than 4,000 federal workers were let go across seven departments. More than half were in HHS and the Treasury Department, according to a court filing.

Yolanda Jacobs, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, said human resource workers who had been furloughed due to the shutdown were brought back for the purpose of sending out termination notices on Friday, including to themselves.

“For nearly a year now, our members have been bullied. They’ve been tormented. They’ve been left in a constant state of panic about job security,” Jacobs said.

Vice President JD Vance told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that the layoffs were needed to help preserve other essential benefits for Americans.

Democrats, however, have said the shutdown does not necessitate that federal workers be fired or give the administration new powers to enact such cuts.

Although Nixon said a “system glitch” was to blame for the termination notices that were sent, then later rescinded, some current and former CDC staffers questioned that explanation and suggested that the latest cuts were part of a larger pattern of reckless, illegal firings.

“It seemed like intentional chaos for the sake of chaos so that nobody knew what was going on,” said an employee who declined to be named for fear of retribution.

CDC staff who got termination notices described mass confusion over which programs were targeted, with one worker saying they had to piece together the puzzle through Reddit forums and text messages.

“These terminations were not a glitch. It was not an innocent error made. This round of firings, as with all the others experienced at CDC in the last 10 months, was an intentional attack on the American people and the public’s health,” Abigail Tighe, a former CDC employee who was fired in an earlier round of layoffs, said Tuesday on a press call. Tighe is now the executive director of the National Public Health Coalition, an advocacy group of former CDC staffers.

Since Trump took office in January, the CDC has undergone three rounds of layoffs. A union spokesperson said the agency has lost 24% of its total workforce — a little over 3,000 employees — since January due to terminations, retirements or people accepting buyout offers.

Aryn Melton Backus, a former employee in the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, said she has received three termination letters from the agency so far this year. Her first came during the Trump administration’s firing of probationary employees in February, she said, followed by a second in April when HHS massively downsized the CDC.

Backus said she is still on administrative leave due to a court case challenging the legality of the firings. However, on Friday, her team received another round of termination notices, which were ultimately rescinded, she said.

“We are doing important work to help prevent smoking, help smokers quit and monitor emerging tobacco products,” Backus said. “Now that work has been abruptly stopped.”

Other employees who were initially terminated last week then brought back include staffers focused on suicide prevention and responses to Ebola and measles outbreaks, according to the National Public Health Coalition.

Morale at the agency remains very low.

“My office had two bullet holes in it,” said Katie Fullerton, who spent 15 years doing infectious disease surveillance at the CDC before she resigned in August, soon after a gunman opened fire on the agency’s headquarters.

“That, combined with all of the thousands of paper cuts that we’ve received from this administration, I decided I did not have five more years in me,” she added. Leaving before her 20-year mark means Fullerton won’t qualify for federal health benefits.