With new cuts at CDC, some fear there’s ‘nobody to answer the phone’

Around 600 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were cut over the long weekend, as part of a wider push by the Trump Administration to slash the size of the federal workforce during the government shutdown.

It was not a smooth process. On Friday, more than 1,300 CDC employees were notified that they had lost their jobs. Many of them were furloughed because of the shutdown, and found out only after Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, posted on X that “the RIFs have begun.”

The next day, around 700 employees got emails revoking these reduction in force notices, according to numbers compiled by the National Public Health Coalition, a group of former CDC employees.

Amid shutdown, Trump administration guts department overseeing special ed