from The Epidemiologist
On Friday, about 1,300 CDC employees received a surprising email: they were fired. No warning. No time to plan. Their badges were immediately deactivated. The justification was a “reduction in force”—a bureaucratic term now being used as a political pawn in the broader Congressional shutdown fight.
This wasn’t the first wave. For months, CDC employees have endured mass layoffs, political interference, the firing of top scientific leaders, a lack of transparency, and fear and uncertainty. But this round struck at the agency’s core. Senior leaders, including the incident manager for the national measles response, were let go. The entire MMWR team—the scientific backbone that translates CDC data into outbreak reports and public guidance—gone. So were epidemic intelligence service officers, the nation’s “disease detectives” who detect and track emerging threats before they spread.
It didn’t stop there. Cuts hit every corner of CDC’s operations:
- Data office: the infrastructure that collects, connects, and analyzes data nationwide.
- CFA INFORM: the “weather service” for infectious diseases.
- CDC Washington Office: the bridge between science and policy.
- Global Health Center: the front line that stops diseases abroad before they reach U.S. shores.
- Chronic Disease Policy and Comms: connecting science to action on diabetes and heart disease.
- Injury Prevention Policy and Comms: addressing gun violence, opioid overdoses, and suicide.
- Ethics teams, human resources, the CDC library (it’s hard to do science without access to scientific literature), and more.
Then came the whiplash. Within 24 hours, 700 employees were reinstated. The administration called it a “coding error.” Maybe. Or maybe it was a scramble to reverse a catastrophic mistake. It’s hard to know precisely who remains fired, but it seems to include staff from ethics, congressional outreach, health statistics, nutrition surveys, and all of human resources. Oh, also, the scientists who work on biodefense, such as weaponized pathogens, remain fired.
For those keeping track, this now accounts for 1 in 3 CDC employees lost over the past few months. This doesn’t account for the 50% additional budget cuts coming in 2026.
What we’re testing in real time
The U.S. is conducting an uncontrolled experiment to see what happens when a public health agency is gutted with immense speed and without a vision beyond destruction. We are getting increasingly close to system collapse. As often attributed to Amit Kalantri: “Systems fail when people with ability don’t have authority and people with authority don’t have ability.”
The questions we’re testing are:
- How much trauma can the workforce absorb? Scientists have been holding the ship together after surviving mass layoffs, working under political interference, getting 500 bullets aimed at them, and mourning colleagues who lost jobs overnight. Public health employees are there for the mission (certainly not the pay), and it’s unclear how much longer that trumps trauma. Of course, cruelty is the point. In February, the OMB said, “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down… We want to put them in trauma.”
- How thin can CDC be stretched? One in three employees has now been lost—either fired or quit—within months. And this is before the 2026 budget, which will cut CDC by an additional 50%.
- How political will CDC become? The fewer career scientists who remain, the more political appointees fill the void. Each round of cuts makes the agency less independent and more beholden to politicians.
- What breaks first, and how will it be felt in American lives? The ultimate question haunting many in public health, including me.
Many of you have asked how MAHA (the movement I’ve been talking with for months) is reacting. It’s complicated. Some are cheering the cuts, seeing them as long-overdue accountability for institutions that failed them. Many have been harmed or dismissed by these very systems. They feel unseen, unheard, and hungry for change. Others, though, are uneasy and recognize that the pendulum has swung too far. And many simply don’t know this is happening, because echochambers continue to drive our information ecosystems. This shouldn’t be too big a surprise, given that MAHA isn’t a monolith.
The real danger
I welcome radical transformation of our systems. They need it. But the danger here isn’t just in what’s being dismantled and how cruelly it’s being done, but in what’s not being built to take its place.
There’s no plan. No rebuilding strategy. No vision grounded in American values of innovation, imagination, and hope, nor the kind of long-term vision that could deliver the health ecosystem Americans deserve. If we don’t fill this vacuum with credible leadership, imagination, and execution, it will be filled with noise, chaos, and ideology.
What this means for you: You won’t feel these latest cuts on the ground tomorrow or the next day, especially since some cores (like the measles lead) were reinstated. But this will continue to be a slow bleed. Eventually it will be measured in American lives.