6 months later, Atlantans are still dealing with the fallout of April's CDC cuts

Editor’s Note: The names in this story have been changed to protect anonymity of former federal workers.

The sun hadn’t yet come up when Charles’s phone started ringing on the morning of April 1. A colleague at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told him employees were receiving reduction in force (RIF) notices as they arrived to work at the Clifton Road campus. Charles found one waiting in his inbox, too.

That morning, 2,400 CDC employees were given RIF notices with no explanation of which positions were being eliminated or why. “It was surreal—nobody knew who was in and who was being let go,” Charles told me during our first conversation, just a few weeks after the mass cuts.

Charles, who worked at CDC for 15 years as a data scientist focusing on preventable injuries, spen