Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, in San Diego this month.Kristian Carreon/The San Diego Union-Tribune/Getty
A new report by the American Federation of Government Workers has documented a staggering level of staff attrition at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the first year of the Trump 2.0 administration. The nation’s premier public health agency lost a third of its workforce from March 2025 through April 2026, the union says.
Those job losses include 100 percent of the staff at two CDC units, the Office of Health Equity and the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, that were entirely eliminated in 2025. Some 98 percent of the CDC’s human resources personnel have also left their jobs, the union says. In spring of 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gutted the federal agency, and in the following months, many of those whose jobs were spared in that bloodbath voluntarily quit or retired. A year later, the union reports, 3,000 fewer people work at the public health agency now overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and newly confirmed CDC Director Erica Schwartz.
What’s left is a “zombified” agency, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases before he resigned in the summer of 2025, told the New York Times this week. Meanwhile, the CDC has done little to respond to high-profile outbreaks of measles, food-borne cyclosporiasis, and rabies. This week, the CDC—which is responsible for instructing doctors and the general public on vaccine use—made no recommendation on the new flu vaccine approved by the FDA in August. “By this time of year in 2024, the CDC had published detailed recommendations for vaccines against respiratory diseases,” the Times reported, including endorsements from the CDC director at the time and notes from a meeting of its vaccine advisers. This year, that group of vaccine advisers has not held a single meeting.
“What we are witnessing is the dismantling of public health infrastructure our country relies on,” Yolanda Jacobs, president of AFGE Local 2883, said in a press release. The US “deserves an agency that is fully prepared to protect the public’s health within and outside its own doors.”
The CDC’s employees also deserve better, she said, noting they “have dedicated their lives to serving the American people.”
“Protecting our nation’s public health workers also protects our nation’s public health,” she said.
