Ars Technica: “The dust is still settling at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a mass layoff on Friday, which former employees at the beleaguered agency are describing as a massacre. In separate press briefings on Tuesday, a network of terminated CDC staff that goes by the name the National Public Health Coalition, and the union representing employees at the agency discussed what the wide-scale cuts mean for the American people, as well as the trauma, despair, and damage they have wreaked on the workers of the once-premier public health agency. In a normal federal layoff—called a reduction in force, or RIF—the agency would be given a full outline of the roles and branches or divisions affected, as well as some explanation for the cuts, such as alleged fraud, abuse, or redundancy. However, the Trump administration has provided no such information or explanation, leaving current and former employees to essentially crowdsource what has been lost and only guess at the possible reasons. The union representing CDC workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2883, has been assessing the cuts since termination emails began arriving in employee inboxes late Friday. The union estimates that the Trump administration sent termination notices to 1,300 CDC employees on Friday, in what they called an illegal “politically-motivated stunt.” Of those 1,300 terminations, around 700 were rescinded, beginning on Saturday. The Trump administration said the 700 rescinded terminations were sent due to a “coding error.” But CDC workers didn’t buy that explanation, saying all the terminations were intentional, and some were only reversed after backlash erupted when people realized what the administration was trying to cut—for example, terminating the experts responding to domestic measles outbreaks and those responding to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who received RIF notices that were later rescinded. Still, with the rescissions, some 600 terminations appear to remain…The CDC’s library staff are all gone.

In all, the union estimated that the CDC has lost 33 percent of its workforce since the start of the Trump administration. In January, there were roughly 13,000 CDC workers total. Since then, about 3,000 have been fully separated from the agency, including 600 laid off in a RIF on April 1, and 2,400 who were either fired or forced out amid pressure campaigns. An additional 1,300 have been laid off but are not yet fully separated from the agency; they remain on paid administrative leave but are unable to do their work. In the RIF Friday, laid-off employees said they were given notices that list their termination effective date as December 8, leaving a 60-day period in which they would be on administrative leave. The RIF was carried out amid an ongoing government shutdown over a health care funding dispute, and the Trump administration has claimed that the RIF is a consequence of the shutdown. But the union, along with federal employment lawyers and even some senior government officials, say a RIF during a shutdown is illegal; a temporary lapse in government funding is not a legitimate reason for a RIF under federal regulations, and it runs afoul of a federal law that prohibits the government from incurring new costs during a shutdown, such as by promising severance packages.