According to Department of Health and Human Services attorneys, administration officials intended to fire 982 employees. But due to “data discrepancies and processing errors” reduction in force (RIF) notices were issued Friday to approximately 1,760 employees.
There’s still no specific accounting of how many people were laid off by each agency, although it appears that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the hardest hit.
Current and former staff, as well as members of the union representing CDC employees at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, have been crowdsourcing data from impacted employees to estimate the exact number of people and positions that have been cut.
According to the unofficial estimates from the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, which represents CDC employees in Atlanta, about 600 CDC employees remained out of work, even after the rescinded notices.
“These illegal firings of our union members during a federal government shutdown is a callous attack on hard working Americans and puts the livelihoods, health and safety of our members and communities at great risk,” AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said Tuesday.
The terminations came after President Trump threatened to axe federal workers in retaliation for the government shutdown, which is going into its third week.
The layoffs also hit non-scientific workers, including IT support and human resources staff, who were brought back from furlough just to email out layoff notices to employees— themselves included.
CDC library staff and museum staff, whose current and former employees said are crucial for supporting research and communicating to the public about what the agency does, were fired.
