The Trump administration is reversing its decision to fire hundreds of staffers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a humiliating about-turn.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told STAT that the CDC will be bringing back more than 450 employees that were fired in an attempt to reorganize the agency.
Some of the departments that will be reinstating employees are: The National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; the Global Health Center; the National Center for Environmental Health; the Immediate Office of the Director.
These divisions helped track and prevent HIV, prevent lead poisoning in children, as well as ensure that cruise lines were safe from disease.
HHS, which also oversees the CDC, first announced this “dramatic restructuring” in March, saying that they would downsize from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees, claiming that it would “save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year.”
The department also revealed that it would be creating a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which would be led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said.
“This Department will do more—a lot more—at a lower cost to the taxpayer,” he claimed.
He reaffirmed this sentiment in an X post in March, noting that these cuts would help eliminate the current “alphabet soup of departments.”
“We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments,” he said.
As a result, around 10,000 employees were fired under the guidance of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Yet Kennedy has already backtracked on these sweeping federal layoffs, admitting in April that too many cuts were made in the effort to “Make America Healthy Again,” though he said that “was always the plan.”
“We’re streamlining the agencies. We’re going to make it work for public health, make it work for the American people. In the course of that, there were a number of instances where studies that should have not have been cut were cut, and we’ve reinstated them,” Kennedy said.
“Personnel that should not have been cut were cut—we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan,” he stated.
