Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

“Disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists, the entire Washington office and the staff of a weekly public health journal were among those who learned late Friday that they would lose their jobs.

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Reporting from Washington

Oct. 11, 2025, 12:34 a.m. ET

https://archive.ph/qx28O

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/us/politics/trump-administration-cdc-layoffs.html

Dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including “disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists and the entire Washington office — were notified late Friday that they were losing their jobs as part of the Trump administration’s latest round of federal layoffs.

It was unclear on Friday how many C.D.C. workers were affected. But it was the latest blow to an agency that has been wracked by mass resignations, a shooting at its Atlanta headquarters in August and the firing of its director under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Layoff notices landed in the email inboxes of C.D.C. employees shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, notifying employees that their duties had been deemed unnecessary or “virtually identical” to those being performed elsewhere in the agency. Scientists, including leaders, in offices addressing respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, injury prevention and global health were among those affected.

The staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the journal that reports on health trends and emerging infectious threats, was also laid off. The publication’s storied history includes a June 1981 report that five previously healthy gay men were treated for an unusual pneumonia — the first hint of the AIDS epidemic.

Roughly 70 Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — the so-called “disease detectives” who respond to outbreaks around the globe — received layoff notices, according to a person familiar with them. The service was spared during an earlier round of layoffs in February.

An officer at an American Federation of Government Employees local union representing C.D.C. employees said that the agency’s human resources staff, which had been furloughed as part of the government shutdown, had been called back to work to send out layoff notices to their colleagues.

The C.D.C. layoffs are part of a round of cuts across the government to fulfill President Trump’s threats to use the shutdown to shrink the federal government. But for the nation’s public health agency, which has been a primary target of Mr. Kennedy, they were the latest crisis in a year of upheaval.