PHARMACIST STEVE

It’s likely no one will answer the phone, a former CDC employee says

https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/washington-watch/117943

Thinking of calling CDC to report a potential disease outbreak? Don’t bother; no one will answer, a former CDC employee said Tuesday.

“If it’s an infection that is being seen in the hospital in four different patients, and the infection control nurse calls [the CDC] … You are working with the physicians, the nurses, the schools, the restaurants, to try and sort through, ‘What is going on and what can we do?'” said Karen Remley, MD, MPH, former director of the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “Sometimes that help might be, ‘We’re going to send some people to you; we’re going to give you more boots on the ground to help you do this.’ Sometimes that might be talking to somebody who’s one of the only world experts on a specific type of infection or a specific type of exposure. But [now] there’s nobody to answer the phone.”

“Being prepared and able to respond to public health emergencies is a core function of CDC,” said John Brooks, MD, former chief medical officer of the CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention, who retired from the CDC in September 2024. “Eight out of every 10 taxpayer dollars that CDC receives from Congress goes directly to support state and local staff and programs to help keep your community safe. Much of the remaining money is used to maintain and grow CDC’s public health expertise and its laboratory capacity that support these funded activities.”

“Today, many experts, including myself, are concerned that we are no longer well prepared for the next big outbreak or disaster because of the Trump administration’s continued erosion of our nation’s ability to respond to public health emergencies,” he added.

The cuts won’t just affect immediate operations like outbreak response — they will also affect longer-range projects, such as the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) that the CDC conducts, Brooks said.

“Many of these very large, annualized … regular surveillance projects take a lot of planning. As they’re collecting data one year, the planning for the next year is well underway — how they’re going to do the randomization, how they’re going to find people, how they’re going to bring the data together and then analyze [it] — all of that is being planned, sometimes years in advance,” he explained. “With these regular surveys that have been collected on behalf of the public for many years, any interruption is unwelcome, because you lose that visibility on what’s happening.”

Remley and Brooks spoke Tuesday at a press conference organized by the National Public Health Coalition following a weekend in which approximately 1,300 HHS employees were fired

; about 700 of those had their termination notices rescinded less than 24 hours later. The Trump administration said those whose terminations were rescinded had been terminated due to a coding error

Reporters at Tuesday morning’s press conference also heard from Aryn Melton Backus, MPH, an employee at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, who has received three different termination notices in the last few months.

“My first termination came during the wave of probationary employee firings,” she said. “On February 14, I was told that I was being terminated for poor performance during my trial period, despite having been on my team for almost 2.5 years and having been recently converted from a contractor to a federal employee. A judge has since ruled that these terminations were illegal.”

“My second termination came on April 1 when my office was eliminated during the agency-wide reduction in force [RIF],” she continued. “At first, I had no way to know if I had received a second termination notice, because my access to the CDC network had been cut off … I was finally able to regain access to my work email, and there was a reduction-in-force notice sent to my work email on April 1.”

“Despite the two termination letters, I’ve remained on administrative leave since February of this year due to a court case challenging the legality of the [first] reduction in force,” Backus said. “When word started spreading about the new reduction force, on October 10, I figured I was safe; a lawsuit [involving] my office prevents us from being further reorganized or fully separated. But then late Friday evening, I started hearing our team had received another reduction in force — a third for me. Luckily, that notice was rescinded less than 24 hours later, but I still remain on administrative leave, unable to do my job. My situation just highlights the chaos and confusion that federal employees have experienced over the past year.”

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents some of the fired workers, is fighting back. “[We are] demanding that all [RIF] notices be rescinded immediately,” AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said at a separate press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “These illegal firings of our union members during a federal government shutdown [are] a callous attack on hardworking Americans and puts the livelihoods, health, and safety of our members and communities at great risk.”

Jacobs said she didn’t believe the now-rescinded RIFs happened because of an error. “I believe it was intentional,” she noted. “The administration did a whole lead-up campaign before they actually sent the notices out, to the point of even having the [Office of Management and Budget] director go on to X and say that the RIFs have begun. So, to me, it was not an error, those areas where they did reverse.” Instead, she added, the reversals happened because there was a lot of pushback on some of the firings.

One employee who received an RIF notice who was given anonymity in order to speak freely said she asked whether she could take another job while on administrative leave and was told she needed approval from the ethics office to be sure there wasn’t a conflict of interest. When the employee asked who she needed to contact in the ethics office, they said, “Well, you can’t, because they all got RIF letters too.”

Filed under: General Problems