Hhs Rehiring Some People Fired Through Reduction-in-force Efforts

Some of the Department of Health and Human Services employees fired through reduction-in-force notices Friday are being rehired, according to two people familiar with the details.

The two people, an HHS official and an employee granted anonymity to speak about internal personnel decisions, said that many employees who received reduction-in-force notices will or already have been informed they will not be terminated. The two said that an unspecified number of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were mistakenly fired through a “coding error.”

Those being rehired, they said, are staff who work on the critical Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the director's office of the Global Health Center and staff working on the measles response and Ebola outbreak response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The HHS official and employee declined to provide a specific number of staff to be rehired.

Additionally, many of the fellows in the Laboratory Leadership Service — who work on lab safety and testing accuracy — are being rehired, said a current CDC employee granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The employee also said that many of the Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — who investigate disease outbreaks — also had their reduction-in-force notices rescinded. A former CDC official said that Sara Patterson, acting director of the Public Health Infrastructure Center, was rehired.

The terminations, which come amid a government shutdown and after the Trump administration repeated threats of mass firings, are being challenged in court by the American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO.

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon on Saturday referred POLITICO to the department’s Friday night statement saying the firings were “a direct consequence of the Democrat-led government shutdown,” adding that the layoffs were necessary because the department became too “bloated” under the Biden administration.

HHS has not provided an official list of terminated employees. According to a court document the Trump administration filed Friday afternoon, 1,100 to 1,200 department employees would be dismissed, including several dozen staff at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, POLITICO has confirmed.

The Trump administration’s reduction in force is still expected to cut deep within the CDC, and the layoffs are the latest iteration in a series of tumultuous months for agency staff.

In August, a gunman who police said had grievances related to the Covid-19 vaccine fired roughly 200 rounds into buildings on the agency’s Atlanta headquarters that killed a police officer. Less than one month later, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. led the charge to oust CDC Director Susan Monarez, who later testified before Congress that she was fired after she refused to rubber-stamp changes to the childhood vaccine schedule. The Monarez ouster then led several top CDC officials to resign, leaving the agency with little institutional knowledge at the leadership level.