CDC cuts put injury tracking and prevention in limbo

• The cuts announced on Friday rippled through the entire federal health bureaucracy, including at the nation's mental health and substance use office and among key biodefense staff. But confusion reigned, as more than half of the targeted workers later had their terminations rescinded.
• "There is no transparency. We still have no idea why certain programs, including mine, were eliminated and others were saved," Aryn Melton Backus, formerly with the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, told reporters yesterday.
• She said she received her third reduction in force notice this year on Friday.

State of play: The injury center has about 250 people left out of roughly 700 it had at the start of the year, according to a source who was granted anonymity to reveal internal agency details.

• With this level of cuts, even the remaining overdose and violence prevention teams will be unable to function, the source said.
• An operations team whose staff had already been halved is now completely terminated. If it's not restored in some way, the ability to collect overdose data and run a violent death reporting system will be in doubt.
• Similarly, the loss of the injury center's science office halts the ability to validate and publish its work.
• "They're just a skeleton of what they used to be," said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director at Safe States Alliance. "Every fired staffer means one less person available to support people on the ground who need real-time information to do the hard work of prevention. This is a tremendous loss."

Zoom out: The Trump administration has also fired the CDC's Washington staffers, who communicate with Congress, along with an employee assistance team that had been providing support to employees in the aftermath of the August shooting at the CDC's Atlanta headquarters.

• Other cuts included the entire staff at the CDC Library, where specialists would help researchers ensure they were accessing comprehensive collections of work from journals around the world, including pre-publication studies.
• "Without that, people [at the CDC] are kneecapped. They don't have full visibility on what the latest information is," said John Brooks, former chief medical officer for the CDC's Division of HIV Prevention, who left the agency last year.

Health and Human Services said when the latest layoff notices went out on Friday that laid-off employees were designated as nonessential and that the agency is ending wasteful and duplicative work.

• Since January, the CDC alone has lost about 3,000 employees between layoffs, retirements and other attrition, according to its employee union.

Outside of the CDC, dozens of staff at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Agency had their jobs terminated, NPR reported. HHS also laid off staff members who work on biodefense at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, per the Washington Post.

• More than 1,000 layoffs were planned at HHS, according to a court filing from the administration. Another document filed Tuesday says the final number of layoffs in the latest round is 982.

What's next: The union representing federal workers is suing the Trump administration to stop the latest layoffs, arguing the White House lacked the authority.

• "There's more on the plates of all these people [who remain], and they're tired and exhausted, and at this point, a lot of them are absolutely fed up." David Woodwell, a former CDC employee who retired earlier this year, told Axios.