What Trump’s Firing Spree Means for the Next Public Health Crisis

These terminations come amid an outbreak of avian influenza that is decimating poultry flocks and may become more widespread among humans, a measles outbreak in west Texas, a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas City, Missouri, and a surge in cases of the seasonal flu. “If we have fewer experts working to prepare for and detect and respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases, then as a whole, the American people will be less healthy and less safe,” said Amanda Jezek, senior vice president of public policy and government relations at the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

If there are fewer employees to surveil developments, and lower capacity for on-the-ground testing, the response to current and future outbreaks would be delayed; this, in turn, would allow diseases to spread and make future outbreaks more difficult to contain, Jezek continued.

There is confusion as to who, exactly, had been fired—according to CBS News, some probationary employees did not receive termination letters, while others received them in error. The firings at CDC were initially expected to affect more than a thousand employees, but the number ended up being closer to 750 employees. A key fellowship which provides on-the-ground tracking of epidemics was on track to have its ranks halved, although the Trump administration appeared to reverse its decision, in a further indication of the instability surrounding these decisions. Other layoffs hit a critical U.S. Department of Agriculture office handling the avian flu response; the USDA later said that those firings were in error, and that it is trying to reverse those firings. (The hasty firing of essential workers, only to reverse course on later review, was one of the hallmarks of Elon Musk’s early days at X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter; Musk is now overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency, which is spearheading these cuts.)