High-level officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been reassigned to remote field offices with the Indian Health Service, three CDC officials and a non-agency source told NOTUS.
The reassignments come as another wave of personnel cuts and reductions in force hit the public health agencies, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk’s DOGE.
“The department is proposing to reassign you as part of a broader effort to strengthen the department,” read an email received by one of the CDC officials, who read it aloud to NOTUS. “One critical area of need is in American Indian and Alaska Native communities. This underserved community deserves the highest quality of service, and HHS needs individuals like you to deliver that service.”
The email listed the potential reassignment field office locations and asked the employee to respond by Wednesday with their preferences. Available locations included Alaska; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Oklahoma; Billings, Montana; Bemidji, Minnesota; and the Navajo Nation.
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Most CDC employees are based either at the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta or elsewhere on the East Coast. The email did not give any further details on reassigned titles or job descriptions and said the employee was placed on administrative leave until they were reassigned.
Two CDC officials told NOTUS that they believed the administration was using the reassignments as a way to push people out of the agency.
The reassigned employees will “likely just quit,” a third CDC official told NOTUS.
In an email, an HHS spokesperson said, “HHS is committed to transforming into a more efficient, streamlined, and effective agency, in line with President Donald J. Trump’s and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s mission to Make America Healthy Again. Ongoing critical public health efforts will remain a top priority and will not be impacted by this administrative realignment.”
Kennedy announced last week that a further 10,000 HHS employees would be cut to add to the 10,000 who were either cut in the probationary worker firings last month or took voluntary buyouts, taking the department’s total staff from 82,000 to 62,000. Many of the employees were removed via reductions in force. But it’s difficult to target individual employees via RIF, which are generally used to lay off entire programs or categories of personnel.
A CDC official who was not reassigned and has direct knowledge of the cuts told NOTUS that approximately 2,300 CDC employees were cut in this week’s RIFs, including a third of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and 20 percent of the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention.
It was not immediately clear if the directors of all 12 CDC centers were reassigned to remote duty stations with the IHS. The CDC official who was not reassigned told NOTUS they believed more than half of the center directors were reassigned.
According to the reassigned CDC official who spoke to NOTUS, reassigned CDC center directors include Kayla Laserson at the CDC’s Global Health Center; Karen Remley at the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities; Jonathan Mermin at the Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; Dylan George at the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics; Karen Hacker at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; and Seth Kroop, a deputy director at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.
The non-agency source told NOTUS that they believed all the CDC center directors other than those at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases had been reassigned.
Kennedy has previously paid special attention to the IHS, which has around 15,000 employees who the agency says provide “direct patient care, public health service, and administrative positions” to native and indigenous communities across the country. In February, Kennedy rescinded the layoffs of nearly 1,000 IHS employees, calling IHS the “redheaded stepchild” of HHS in a statement and saying that it would be a priority during his tenure.
“President Trump wants me to end the chronic disease epidemic beginning in Indian country,” Kennedy said.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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