Health Department Confirms Some CDC Workers Incorrectly Received Termination Notices

Some Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employees who received termination notices were later told that they are not being dismissed, according to the agency’s parent department.

“The employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” Andrew Nixon, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told The Epoch Times in an Oct. 12 email.

HHS did not respond to a request for more information, including how many CDC employees were wrongly informed that they were being laid off.

Office of Management and Budget official Stephen Billy said in a court filing on Oct. 10 that the office in September told senior officials with agencies that are without funding because of the government shutdown to start reductions in force once funding expired on Sept. 30. This applied to employees who were working on projects “not consistent with the President’s priorities,” he said.

Some of the agencies began initiating layoffs on Oct. 10, Billy said, and those included HHS, which was terminating 1,100 to 1,200 workers.

The filing did not provide the number of terminated CDC employees.

In a contingency plan released ahead of the government shutting down because of a lack of appropriations from Congress, HHS said that it would furlough about 41 percent of its 79,717 workers if a shutdown happened. It said that compensation for the others, which includes workers needed to protect life and property, such as CDC employees who monitor for disease outbreaks, is financed outside of the appropriations.

Some functions, including CDC communication, would be hampered by the funding lapse, HHS also said.

Officials with the American Federation of Government Employees told news outlets that approximately 1,300 CDC workers received termination notices on Oct. 10. Within 24 hours, they said, about 700 employees had been informed that they were not being terminated.

Earlier in the year, 2,473 CDC workers were let go as part of an HHS restructuring plan, according to a Senate panel. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in April that officials reversed some initial layoffs because they had terminated some workers who should not have been let go.

“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” Everett Kelley, the union’s national president, said in a statement.

The federation and other unions in September sued the government over its reduction-in-force plans, alleging that carrying out mass terminations during the shutdown would violate federal law.

They later asked a judge to halt agencies from firing workers, saying that HHS required employees to work over the weekend to keep issuing reduction-in-force notices to CDC employees.

Administration officials told the judge overseeing the case that the case is faulty in part because agencies have the authority to engage in mass terminations.

A hearing is set for Oct. 15 in federal court in San Francisco.

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. The Epoch Times regrets the error.