Five senior CDC leaders to depart as agency braces for deep cuts

By Meg Tirrell, CNN

(CNN) — Five key division leaders at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are leaving the public health agency as it braces for cuts that could affect as much as a third of its workforce.

The departures, announced internally Tuesday, comprise the directors of the Public Health Infrastructure Center, the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, the Office of Science, the Office of Policy Performance and Evaluation and the Office of Health Equity, according to a person familiar with the situation, who declined to be named because the announcement wasn’t made publicly.

The Associated Press first reported the plans, which it said were described as retirements and announced at a meeting of senior agency leaders.

The departures come as CDC staffers anticipate Reduction in Force notifications in the coming days that could cut staff and budget by as much as 30%, according to another CDC source who saw a draft of the plans and wasn’t authorized to discuss them publicly.

One staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said CDC employees worried that the division leaders’ departures suggested that those centers and offices could be hit hard by cuts.

The director of the CDC’s Office of Communications, Kevin Griffis, also left the agency last week, and on Tuesday, he published an opinion essay in the Washington Post skewering Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership of government health agencies.

“Public health communications have slowed to a trickle,” Griffis wrote. “The CDC hasn’t held a public briefing, despite multiple disease outbreaks, since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

“Instead of seeking guidance about how to combat the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico from the world-leading epidemiologists and virologists he oversees, Kennedy is listening to fringe voices who reinforce his personal beliefs,” Griffis continued, noting that he “watched as career infectious-disease experts were tasked with spending precious hours searching medical literature in vain for data to support Kennedy’s preferred treatments.”

“Public health communications should be about empowering people with reliable, science-based information, so they can make their own health decisions,” Griffis wrote. “Unfortunately, we can’t count on Kennedy’s HHS for that anymore.”

On Monday, Trump said he planned to nominate the agency’s current acting director, Dr. Susan Monarez, as CDC director. Although some in the public health research community cheered the news, citing her long career of health work in the federal government, some agency staffers worried that she wouldn’t sufficiently defend the agency against coming cuts.

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