A federal labor union has accused the Department of Health and Human Services of “targeting science” amid hundreds of layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, The Hill reported on Friday.
Yolanda Jacobs, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 2883, said the firings at HHS “gut frontline science and shut down life-saving public health programs.”
“The layoffs are not targeting inefficiency, they are targeting science,” Jacobs said. “Public health researchers and frontline scientists are being thrown out of their jobs while the country faces growing environmental, occupational, and public health crises.”
Earlier in the month, 19 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit in federal court saying the Trump administration’s firings have irreparably harmed lifesaving programs and have left the states to carry the financial burden. In March, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. terminated more than 10,000 employees and restructure the entire entity so that 28 agencies were now move under 15.
Earlier in the week, Kennedy rehired 300 NIOSH employees assuring Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., whose district was heavily affected by the firings, that the program would continue. The AFGE has called the rehires a “zero-sum game” because HHS intends to cut an equal number of CDC employees to make up for the rehires.
Earlier in the day, the Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a temporary injunction on the mass layoffs of federal employees. In May, a district judge in California ruled the federal firings were illegal because they did not have congressional oversight.
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