The last few months have been tumultuous for the CDC, which has seen the ouster of Director Susan Monarez and all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Hundreds of employees at the CDC had a rough weekend, with the Trump administration thinning the agency’s ranks by more than a thousand—before reinstating hundreds.
According to several media reports, the government late on Friday informed about 1,300 workers that they would no longer be with the CDC. These layoffs came in the midst of a government shutdown in which the Trump administration had threatened to further cut the federal workforce, but were otherwise without warning and affected a wide range of roles, including data gathering and publication and combatting a variety of threats to public health, epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina said in a LinkedIn post. Jetelina served as a senior scientific consultant for the CDC from 2022 to March 2025.
“Some will cheer that they’ve cut ‘bureaucracy,’” she wrote, adding that these layoffs will have far-reaching consequences for public health in the U.S. Disease monitoring, for instance, will slip, and outbreaks will go unseen. “When data stops flowing, early warnings disappear. The ‘invisible shield’ that keeps us safe from measles, flu, and the next unknown virus begins to crack,” Jetelina added.
Then, on Saturday, the CDC walked back around 700 of these layoffs. In a statement to CNN, Andrew Nixon, director of communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, said that employees who received “incorrect” terminations “were never separated” from the CDC. Some 600 people remain fired.
Those who have been reinstated include staff involved in measles response, as well as some employees at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, which oversees vaccination programs across the country. Layoffs at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, in charge of quick frontline response to emerging diseases, were also reversed.
Experts have argued that it is illegal for the Trump administration to permanently lay off federal employees during the shutdown. Even before the shutdown, the CDC endured months of staffing upheaval. Perhaps most controversial of these was the ouster of former Director Susan Monarez, who was fired in late August, just 28 days into her tenure, after she refused to acquiesce to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s request to pre-approve vaccine recommendations.
In a surprise move in June, Kennedy also emptied the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, claiming that the panel “has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.” He has since reformed the committee, with some new members having documented histories of anti-vaccine statements.
This year has likewise witnessed sweeping cuts at HHS, with Kennedy in March announcing a 10,000-person reduction in the department’s headcount. According to a BioSpace tally, these cuts eliminated some 2,400 posts at the CDC.
