After losing thousands of staffers and facing attacks this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hampered in its ability to protect the public from health problems and emergencies.
It’s been a tough year at the CDC. The federal agency charged with protecting the nation’s public health has been weakened by repeated job cuts and turmoil under the current administration. NPR health correspondent Pien Huang reports.
Aryn Melton Backus began the year as a health communications specialist at CDC. Then the administration instituted multiple rounds of reductions in force (RIFs). Backus received termination emails in several rounds—what staff nicknamed the Valentine’s Day, April Fool’s Day, and shutdown RIFs—but she remains on administrative leave and unable to do her job.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the CDC “has been broken for a long time” and that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is committed to restoring it through sustained reform, adding that the agency continues to protect Americans guided by science and common sense.
This year the CDC effectively lost roughly a quarter to a third of its workforce—thousands of people. Programs aimed at reducing smoking, cavities, and gun violence were halted. Staff trained to respond to radiation emergencies or to outbreaks that cause birth defects have been let go. In response, Backus and former CDC employees formed the National Public Health Coalition to gather reports from current and former staff because, she says, there’s little transparency from the administration.
Backus and colleagues say remaining staff are demoralized and alarmed by statements on topics such as vaccines, autism, and measles that contradict scientific consensus yet are issued in the agency’s name. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, a top vaccine official who resigned in August, described the CDC as a “zombie”—an agency with large, random gaps from early cuts and more recent reductions suggesting a narrower future role.
Daskalakis said the agency may shrink to “a very compact thing that does infectious disease responses, maybe some data stuff and labs. That’s it.” He and former CDC colleague Dr. Debra Houry co-wrote in The Lancet that the CDC is in critical condition. Houry, who was the last career scientist at the agency’s highest ranks before leaving in August, warned that leadership now lacks essential experience in science and coordination with state and local health departments.
HHS has confirmed a new second-in-command, Dr. Ralph Abraham, formerly Louisiana’s surgeon general. Some public health officials are alarmed: earlier this year Abraham banned Louisiana’s health department from promoting vaccines. Houry also notes that many changes at CDC align with Project 2025, a conservative Heritage Foundation blueprint, and she criticized moves such as cutting the agency’s ethics board while invoking “gold-standard science” and “radical transparency.”
Houry says the CDC has lost far more than jobs this year—it has lost trust and critical capacity to protect the nation from future health crises.
Pien Huang, NPR News.