After firings, funding cuts, and a shooting, can a demoralized CDC workforce recover?

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Jess Mador

After firings, funding cuts and a shooting, can a demoralized CDC workforce recover?

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On the coffee table at her home in Atlanta, Sarah Boim has a pile of documents from her old job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Georgia. They are printouts of her own employment records.

Boim lost her job in the first big wave of CDC firings — when about 1,000 people were suddenly let go last February.

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This story was produced in partnership with KFF Health News.

"This is the termination letter. I also printed off my performance review from 2024," she said. "I knew I wouldn't have access to it, and everything was so chaotic that I needed proof of what was happening."

Boim worked in the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, handling communications about radon, P-FAS contamination, lead poisoning and other health threats.

Reading her termination letter once again, she still can't believe what it says.

"The agency finds you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge, and skills do not fit the agency's current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency."

"And that floored me," Boim said, "Because my performance was rated outstanding, and I even got a raise. It was just deeply insulting. So, I was more upset than I think I was prepared to be."

Former CDC employee Sarah Boim re-reads the termination letter, at her home in Atlanta. Boim lost her job in the first big round of firings in mid-February, 2025, just weeks into the second Trump administration. Jess Mador/WABE hide caption

The Trump administration later brought back some of the workers who were fired in the first round, but it has also continued to cut more staff and funding.

The CDC has been without a permanent director for more than six months. Recently the Trump administration said that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya will become the CDC's interim director for now — while also running the National Institutes of Health.

The uncertainty is just the latest in a year of disruption and dismissals at the Atlanta-based institution, where more than 3,000 public health workers are now gone. That includes staffers the Trump administration terminated, but also workers who accepted early retirements.

The Atlanta region continues to feel the ripple effects of the turmoil.

By the end of 2025 the CDC had lost roughly a quarter of its workforce, a KFF Health News analysis found.

Boim now works as a contractor in the health field, while also working a non-health-related freelance job.

Dozens of protesters rallied across the street from the CDC campus in Atlanta, marking a year since the first mass firings began at the CDC under the Trump administration. The cuts affected thousands at multiple federal agencies, and began Feb. 13, 2025, and continued for several days after, leading many to call it the Valentine's Day Massacre. Jess Mador/WABE hide caption

Boim is still in mourning for the cuts at CDC, and how the loss of expertise and resources will trickle down to communities. A significant portion of CDC funding goes directly to states and local public health departments.

"In terms of health, it will cause generational harm, which always makes me tear up," Boim said. "The harm that's going to come to people that don't even know what CDC was protecting them from."

"But for Atlanta, there's a lot of us, there are thousands of CDC employees that live here," she added. "We are your friends, your neighbors, your family, and with the lost income, it has an impact on local businesses also."

At Sri Thai restaurant, across the street from the main CDC campus in Atlanta's DeKalb County, more than a third of the customers are CDC employees, said Manager Nathan Chanthavong.

Nathan Chanthavong manages Sri Thai restaurant in Atlanta, which saw a drop in catering orders in 2025 from the CDC campus across the street. Jess Mador/WABE hide caption

The restaurant saw a "small dip" in business in 2025 after the mass firings, and also during the government shutdown in the fall, he said.

"Typically, we would get a catering order for the CDC. We saw it less, less and less. It's not a really big impact, but catering is a big order, it is a lot of money," he said, "so it does affect us."

CDC falls under the purview of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Asked about the cuts and attrition, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon sent an email to NPR and KFF:

"HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy, growing its budget by 38% and its workforce by 17%.  The Department continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again agenda," he said.

Since the mass firings began, former CDC workers and their supporters have protested every Tuesday during the afternoon rush hour outside the CDC's main entrance.