CDC employees on chaos of being fired, rehired and fired again: 'stuck in limbo'
Source: The Guardian
Fri 31 Oct 2025 08.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 31 Oct 2025 08.02 EDT
As layoff notices swept through the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on 10 October, Aryn Melton Backus thought she would be safe this time. Then she received the email: she was part of a major reduction in force (RIF) during the US government shutdown. It wasn’t the first time she’d been fired from the CDC by email, nor the second. Backus has been terminated and then reinstated three times this year.
Her experience demonstrates the inefficiencies and tumult at US health agencies as leaders continue cutting into the workforce and ending programs vital for Americans’ health. The latest round of shutdown RIFs is illegal, according to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which is among the unions representing federal workers that are suing the government to stop the layoffs. A quarter of the CDC has now been cut by multiple rounds of layoffs.
Some employees who had to work without pay through the shutdown received RIF notices; others who were furloughed learned they would never return to their jobs. Employees who were supposed to be protected from RIFs by an ongoing lawsuit received them anyway. The human resources department at CDC was brought back from unpaid furlough in order to process about 1,300 layoffs – and then their own, as the entire HR department was eliminated.
Some of the gutted departments are required by law to continue their work, despite having no employees. The ethics office and the institutional review board (IRB) were also ended, which means the CDC will no longer have oversight on ethical violations and research protocols.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/31/cdc-employees-hiring-firing-limbo
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