New York (AP) – A Top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official told staff this week to start planning the agency’s break.
Several parts of the CDC – mainly those devoted to health threats which are not infectious – are transferred to the administration which will soon be created for a healthy America, said the agency manager in calls and meetings.
The directive came from Dr. Debra Houry, the agency’s head doctor, according to three CDC officials who were present. They refused to be identified because they were not allowed to speak of plans and to fear being dismissed if they were identified.
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Invited to comment, Houry referred the Associated Press to representatives of the CDC media. CDC spokesperson Jason McDonald acknowledged that the agency provided for possible changes, but that “none of the elements discussed at the meeting has been finalized and is likely to change”.
Dr. Scott Harris, president of the association of State and territorial health officials, said that there were “many more questions than answers at the moment”.
These questions include if the split will interrupt funding and assistance to the state health services which ultimately implement the federal health policy, said Harris, who is also responsible for the health of the Alabama State.
“We would like to be able to give comments,” he said.
Officials deciding what to do with programs that have lost many staff members
The Atlanta -based CDC is responsible for protecting Americans from avoidable health threats. It had around 13,000 employees at the start of the year, their most in Georgia.
Since its entry into office in January, the Trump administration has embarked on a spectacular reduction of many federal agencies. CDC staff have been reduced by retirement cycles and layoffs that have reduced staff by 3,500 to 4,000 employees.
The layoffs not only targeted employment classifications, but offices and programs. For example, everyone in the CDC division on dental health has been eliminated, as is most workers in an office that is investigating occupational diseases and promotes professional security.
Now, federal health officials decide how to go up what remains. They have a deadline on Monday to submit a reorganization plan to the White House.
The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has already described the plans for the new administration for a healthy America, which would largely focus on health problems not caused by infections.
“We are not only reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We realign the organization with its main mission and our new priorities in the inversion of the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said in a statement last month.
Experts wonder if CDC workers should move
Kennedy said the AHA would contain – among others – the health of resources and services, the administration of drug and mental health services and the American general surgeon.
During this week’s meetings, Houry said that the new AHA agency would also absorb what remains of CDC centers devoted to congenital malformations, chronic conditions, environmental health, injuries and occupational safety.
It is not clear that these staff members would remain in Atlanta – and that “deeply count,” said Jason Schwartz, a health policy researcher at Yale University who studies government health agencies.
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If these jobs are moved to the Washington, DC region, “you will certainly lose many types of experts who have built lives and careers and families in Atlanta and the surrounding area, many of whom would not be sure or do not want to move their lives,” he said.
This would probably mean “you are building something again, rather than just changing the reporting lines,” he said.
The remaining HIV staff of the CDC would be transferred to a new agency
The parts of the CDC which are not moved to the AHA would mainly focus on infectious diseases, with a notable exception: HIV.
CDC HIV prevention staff were decimated in layoffs, 160 people eliminated. What remains – HIV monitoring and agency laboratory operations, for example – would go to AHA as part of the realignment plan.
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Such a change would place that the CDC works in the same organizational umbrella as the Ryan White HIV / AIDS program from HRSA. This program provides ambulatory care, processing and support for people living, but no health insurance.
A cleavage of the CDC was proposed in the 2025 project, the government’s warming proposal of the Balayage Heritage Foundation which surfaced last year. This document called the CDC “the most incompetent and arrogant agency of the federal government” and proposed to divide them into two small agencies – one focused on data collection on disease and the other more generally on public health.