Public health workers reflect on a year since mass layoffs at the CDC

Caption

Sarah Boim, a former a communications director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks to a crowd outside the agency's Atlanta headquarters on Feb. 10, 2026.

Credit: Sofi Gratas/GPB News

An estimated 10% of jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were cut last February, the first in a series of reductions in force ordered at the Department of Health and Human Services by the Trump administration last year.  

By the end of the year, between a quarter to a third of employees at the CDC had been terminated.   

The Fired but Fighting coalition estimates that about 300 CDC employees are still on administrative leave — still being paid but not allowed to work.   

“We work to protect the population of the United States and, you know, really care about every dollar, every penny that gets spent wisely,” said one person on administrative leave from the Office on Smoking and Health, who feared sharing her name since she’s still technically an employee. 

She joined retired, fired and current CDC employees at the CDC Atlanta headquarters on Tuesday. Battery-powered candles lit up the corner of Clifton Road in the style of a vigil commemorating the mass layoffs.  

Offices under the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, were nearly decimated by the RIFs. The National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention and the National Center for Environmental Health were also affected but were among those that saw employees reinstated last summer.  

Most recently, the federal government rescinded RIFs at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.  

“Trauma is one thing, and I think this whole sense of loss of building protections and building systems that function for everybody,” said the anonymous employee on administrative leave. “It's easy to break them, and it is really hard to build them.”  

Public health workers who received termination letters last Valentine’s Day weekend were told they came as the result of “poor performance,” said Sarah Boim, a former communications manager at the CDC.  

“I guess it didn't take me long to get from a heartbreak over the loss of my job to kind of white-hot rage,” she told the crowd on Tuesday.  

A year later, Boim now helps lead the National Public Health Coalition, a nonprofit born out of Fired but Fighting. The organization continues to call for the immediate removal of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  

Current staff say that even with reinstatements in some key departments, work on chronic disease prevention, maternal health and vaccine education has been stunted.  

There’s also the effect on the future generation of public health workers, said Daniel Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. His resignation last fall coincided with the firing of former agency director, Susan Monarez.

Jernigan cited a recent analysis of national employment data by the magazine Science, which points to a loss of over 10,000 federal workers last year with doctorates in science, technology, engineering and math.  

“We will not be ready for a big pandemic,” he said. “We won't have the staff to be able to do that.”  

• RELATED: Months of tumult and waves of staff cuts take a toll on the CDC 

Fired employees across the CDC are hoping for relief from a class action lawsuit over the RIFs cleared last month by a federal judge, despite the federal government’s push to have it dismissed. 

The Fired but Fighting coalition has raised over $200,000 in mutual aid funds for terminated employees who haven't yet found work.