Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received termination notices by email Tuesday morning, part of a sweeping U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reorganization that will ultimately eliminate about 2,400 positions at the Atlanta-based agency.
The layoffs are the local front line of a broader 10,000-position reduction across HHS announced last week by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has signaled since his confirmation that the department’s workforce would be substantially restructured.
The Atlanta layoffs hit offices across CDC, including the Office on Smoking and Health, where the majority of staff — more than 90 people — received termination notices, according to one of the affected employees.
“We were told on a Tuesday morning, by email, with no advance warning, that our positions had been eliminated. There was no individual conversation. There was no transition plan.”
— Kevin Caron, health scientist, CDC Office on Smoking and Health
What happened Tuesday
CDC employees across the agency’s Atlanta campuses began receiving Reduction in Force notices by email shortly after 7 a.m. Tuesday. The notices informed recipients that their positions had been “identified for elimination” as part of the HHS reorganization, and that they would be formally separated from federal service within 60 days.
The notices were sent without prior internal communication, and many affected employees said they learned about the broader layoff plan only through news coverage late last week.
“This is not how you reorganize the world’s leading public-health agency. You do not tell the people who track diseases for a living that they no longer have jobs by sending them an email at 7 a.m.”
— Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director, American Public Health Association
Which offices are affected
The layoffs span a wide swath of CDC’s Atlanta-based operations. Employees affected by Tuesday’s action include staff in:
- Office on Smoking and Health — nearly the entire office
- Division of Violence Prevention
- Global Health Center
- Office of Equal Employment Opportunity
- Several offices in the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
Two CDC centers — the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Research and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — will be moved out of Atlanta under the reorganization, with their headquarters relocating to other cities. That move will affect an additional several hundred positions, most of which are expected to be eliminated rather than relocated, given that affected employees have already been told they will not be offered transfers.
What Atlanta loses
CDC is the largest employer in metro Atlanta after Delta Air Lines and Emory University, with about 13,000 federal employees and another 8,000 contractors working from the agency’s various campuses along Clifton Road and in the surrounding area.
The immediate economic effect of the layoffs will be concentrated in DeKalb County, where most CDC employees live. But the longer-term effect on Atlanta’s economy — through lost contracts with local vendors, reduced real-estate demand, and the broader chilling effect on the city’s life-sciences sector — could be substantially larger.
“Atlanta built itself, in part, into the public-health capital of the world on the back of the CDC. The ripple effects of this kind of workforce reduction don’t stay inside the agency. They go straight into the city.”
— Sam Williams, president, Metro Atlanta Chamber
What HHS says
HHS officials, in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, said the reorganization is intended to “consolidate redundant administrative functions” and “right-size the department to focus on its core mission of protecting the public health.”
The statement did not address questions about how the agency would maintain scientific programs whose entire staffing complements were eliminated Tuesday.
What’s next
Employees who received RIF notices will continue working for a 60-day transition period. During that time, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents many CDC workers, is expected to file grievances and potentially lawsuits challenging the layoffs on procedural grounds.
A candlelight vigil in support of CDC workers was held on the agency’s main campus Friday evening, drawing several hundred current and former employees.
Aisha Bell covers the Atlanta economy, energy, and infrastructure for WACN 21. Reach her at abell@wacn21.com.
