Former CDC Officials Add to Concerns of Trump’s Staff Cut Harms

Former top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials that departed during the Trump administration added their voices to those concerned that the firing of federal health workers during the government shutdown is a threat to agency functions such as research and reviews for conflict of interest.

Former CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry told reporters Wednesday that “research is going to stop” at the agency after President Donald Trump eliminated its Institutional Review Board, which reviews research.

Houry, who resigned from the CDC after Trump fired agency leader Susan Monarez over disagreements on vaccines, also warned that an office that considers ethics conflicts for CDC leaders and advisory committee members was eliminated, despite being a “priority” for top Trump health official Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Houry made remarks days after the Trump administration sent reduction-in-workforce emails to over a thousand federal health employees, many of which were quickly rescinded. A union for federal workers said that about 1,300 CDC workers were targeted by the administration, but that around 700 employees later received notice that their terminations were rescinded.

The firings came as part of the government shutdown, the latest move in a contentious cycle between former CDC officials and Kennedy, who has accused the agency—which operates under his US Department of Health and Human Services—of being corrupt.

Houry on Wednesday also said it didn’t “make sense” for the CDC to cut its National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, given it aligned with Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again effort to reduce chronic disease. That survey measures nutrition and health for US adults and children.

Houry expressed concern over the elimination of the CDC’s Employee Assistance Program for staff counseling and support, particularly after the shooting attack at that targeted the agency earlier this year.

Joining Houry was Demetre Daskalakis, who served as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and also resigned after Monarez’s exit.

Daskalakis said a CDC office that makes sure panels like the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices follow rules and regulations was likewise now gone. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, dismissed the members of that panel this year and restocked the committee that advises the CDC on immunization recommendations with his own choices.

In overhauling ACIP, Kennedy spurred concerns from public health experts that he was moving to shake up the immunization schedule. The panel has since taken steps at odds with public health orthodoxy, including voting to ban the little-used preservative thimerosal in flu shots and claiming it would review the childhood vaccine schedule.

“Given what we know about how that committee is functioning now, that portends not a good thing in terms of the direction of immunization,” Daskalakis said.

“If there’s a critical function that was cut, CDC will move other people to fill that critical function, which means the dominoes fall and the function that that person has been moved from is no longer going to be tended to,” Daskalakis said. “The silencing and the downsizing of CDC means that we’re not prepared for daily public health as well as for emergencies.”