After losing thousands of staff and facing repeated attacks this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is increasingly hampered in its ability to protect the public from health problems and emergencies.
Aryn Melton Backus began 2024 as a health communications specialist at CDC. Then the administration moved to cut jobs in multiple rounds. Backus describes three waves of reductions in force — one in February, another in April and a third around the government shutdown — and says she received termination notices each time. She remains on administrative leave and is not performing her job.
Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the CDC has been “broken for a long time” and that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is committed to restoring the agency through sustained reform, adding that CDC continues to protect Americans “guided by gold-standard science and common sense.”
But many career staff disagree. This year the agency has effectively lost a quarter to a third of its workforce — thousands of positions. Programs aimed at reducing smoking, cavities and gun violence were halted. Specialists trained to respond to radiation emergencies or outbreaks that cause birth defects are gone. Backus and former CDC employees have organized the National Public Health Coalition to gather reports from staff, trying to fill an information gap because HHS has declined to confirm the full scope of cuts or the areas affected.
Staff report demoralization and alarm over official statements on vaccines, autism and measles that they say contradict scientific consensus. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, a top vaccine official who resigned in August, said the agency feels like a “zombie” and that early rounds of cuts created patchy gaps across CDC programs. He and others warn that more recent reductions point to a future where CDC is a much smaller operation focused mainly on infectious disease response, some data functions and laboratories.
Dr. Debra Houry, the last career scientist at CDC’s highest levels until her departure in August, wrote with Daskalakis in The Lancet that the agency is in critical condition. Houry says leadership now lacks crucial experience in science and in coordinating with state and local health departments, making it difficult to set and oversee agency priorities.
HHS has confirmed Dr. Ralph Abraham, former Louisiana surgeon general, as a new second-in-command at CDC. But some public health officials are alarmed by his past actions, including having barred a state health department from promoting vaccines. Houry and others note that many changes at CDC echo recommendations in the conservative Project 2025 blueprint from The Heritage Foundation.
Critics also point to actions like cutting CDC’s ethics board and public statements that, they say, contradict the agency’s scientific foundations. Beyond jobs, they warn, the CDC is losing trust and capacity to protect the nation from future health crises.
Pien Huang, NPR News.
