It began with four words posted shortly before 12:30pm on Friday, Oct. 10.
“The RIFs have begun,” Russ Vought — a key Project 2025 author turned Office of Management and Budget director spearheading the Trump administration’s effort to reshape the federal workforce — wrote on X.
By the end of the day, according to administration sources and court records, upwards of 4,200 government employees had received notices of termination -- formally known within the government as “reductions-in-force,” or RIFs. Among the agencies bearing the brunt of the layoffs were the Departments of Treasury and Health and Human Services, though some employees working in the Departments of Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Commerce were also laid off, as were some in the Environmental Protection Agency, government sources told Scripps News.
OMB officials have declined repeated requests to provide further clarity on the scope and scale of the RIFs, telling Scripps News only that they layoffs were “significant” and needed due to congressional Democrats’ refusal to support a government appropriations extension package.
On Tuesday, OMB officials signaled that more RIFs could be on the horizon. “OMB is making every preparation to batten down the hatches and ride out the Democrats’ intransigence,” the agency’s account wrote on X. “Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs, and wait.”
As Scripps News has previously reported, OMB’s effort represents the first known instance of a government funding lapse being used to justify mass layoffs in this fashion. Despite Trump administration officials’ repeated attestations otherwise, nothing in the law requires them to carry out RIFs due to a shutdown.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, employees impacted by the RIFs described a chaotic and Kafkaesque rollout process — particularly at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an agency disproportionately impacted by Friday’s cuts.
The Trump administration is causing “intentional confusion around these mass firings,” AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs, who oversees the union chapter for CDC employees, told reporters Tuesday. “This administration has more than delivered on its promise to traumatize federal employees.”
“This is now the third series of cuts to CDC among their staff,” echoed Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s former Chief Medical Officer who resigned in protest following the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez. It’s “traumatic for the staff, and really leaving CDC less prepared to protect all of us.”
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‘An outbreak of firings’: CDC cuts by the numbers
The total number of CDC employees laid off by the government, including which offices and programs were impacted, remains a moving target.
According to a court filing on Oct. 10 pursuant to ongoing litigationby government employee unions seeking to block the layoffs, between 1,100-1,200 employees within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) received RIF notices on Friday -- and sources say the CDC has overwhelmingly borne the brunt of such cuts.
Union officials representing those employees, however, say they never received any notification about the cuts, as required by federal law and Office of Personnel Management policy. Furthermore, sources say, CDC leaders were not consulted about which employees would be subject to layoffs, with HHS political officials instead making such decisions.
“HHS sent this out without even telling CDC what they were doing,” according to one worker. “[Newly laid off workers] reached out to CDC leadership and none of them knew, and they reached out to CDC HR higher ups to say, ‘are you going to have a meeting?’ And those people replied and said, ‘No, because we got our if letters too.’”
As a result, CDC employees — most of whom were already furloughed due to the ongoing government shutdown — scrambled to piece together information about the impact of the cuts, crowd-sourcing data and scouring online forums for clarity.
“We're a data agency, we're an outbreak chasing agency, and this is an outbreak of firings,” one RIF’d employee said when asked about the total number of workers subject to cuts. “We're doing our best to chase it, but I want to acknowledge that those numbers might differ depending on what we're hearing.”
An HHS spokesperson declined to speak to which administration officials were involved in RIF decisions or how the cuts were identified. Employees “across multiple divisions have received reduction-in-force notices as a direct consequence of the Democrat-led government shutdown,” Andrew Nixon told Scripps News Friday. “All HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions."
Yet just one day later, as the scope and impact of the CDC cuts became more clear, officials reversed course. CDC employees said some 700 workers received notices that their RIFs were sent in error and they were not, in fact, laid off.
Administration officials confirmed as much in a revised court filing on Oct. 14, revealing that RIF notices went to 1,760 HHS employees – nearly 600 more than initially disclosed to the court -- but only 982 employees were actually laid off; the initial, greater number of layoff notices was sent “as a result of data discrepancies and processing errors,” the official wrote.
Some CDC employees, meanwhile, think the change had less to do with a computer glitch and more to do with political pushback.
“I don't believe it was an error. I believe it was intentional,” said Jacobs, the CDC’s union leader.“Those areas where they did reverse, I only believe it was because it was a pushback... Had it not been for that, I believe that those people would also remain RIF’d.”
“It was without thought,” she added. "There's been no plan, and the disorganization is obvious.”
Compounding employees’ pain was the fact that some workers who had been furloughed due to the shutdown were called back into work to process the layoff notices – forced to send messages to their peers informing them they’d lost their jobs.
Other RIF’d workers questioned why the layoffs would take effect in mid-December, just as the holiday season begins.
“How are we supposed to find a new job when we finally can on December 9, between Thanksgiving and the holidays?” the RIF’d worker posed. “Nobody's going to be hiring during that time.”
Employees who asked if they could pursue job applications before their termination took effect said they were told government ethics rules prevented that, but were urged to reach out to ethics officials to request a waiver. But those officials, too, had been laid off, imperiling such prospects.
“You're telling me I can't go try to make some money to support my family while I'm not getting paid because I can't get the right approval to go through it?” a newly-RIF'd employee said through tears.
Despite stereotypes of government workers receiving large paychecks for minimal work, the reality, according impacted employees, is that many live paycheck-to-paycheck. Without their salaries, growing numbers of workers are turning to food banks for help.
“Behind all of these policies, these attacks and personnel decisions, there are real people here who have dedicated their lives to serve this nation's health,” one worker said. “I just live in a state of trauma.”
Public health impacts
Absent concrete information from the Trump administration about exactly which programs and offices were cut, it’s difficult to predict the full impact of the CDC’s layoffs.
Still, former department leaders and public health experts are raising the alarm about what the RIFs mean for the future of our nation’s health.
“Research is going to stop at CDC,” Houry, the former CDC medical director said bluntly. “Key offices at CDC are gone.”
Several high-profile officials and offices initially cut — including those working on federal measles response team, scientists trying to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and those that put together theMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the CDC’s highly-respected scientific journal – have since been reinstated, according to CDC employees and union officials.
But the remaining cuts will still significantly hamper the agency’s ability to respond to public health emergencies, officials said.
Among the programs and offices significantly or entirely cut by the most recent round of RIFs are, according to current and former officials: the CDC’s human resources office, its Institutional Review Board, the ethics office, the federal advisory committee office, the technology transfer office, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study, most program communication and policy offices, most museum and library staff and nearly the entirety of the CDC’s Washington office.
Whereas the earlier rounds of layoffs focused on “high profile cuts to specific groups that focused on specific issues,” the shutdown-related RIFs are “across the board, across multiple programs,” a union official said.
Altogether, between multiple rounds of RIFs, firing of probationary employees and the deferred resignation program, CDC has lost upwards of 3,000 employees since January, with another 1,300 poised to depart once their layoffs take effect. That amounts to an effective reduction of the agency’s size by one-third, officials said.
Even with the reinstatement of some of the more high-profile scientists working on infectious disease responses, the cuts will be felt by the American public, according to Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the CDC’s former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases who resigned in protest earlier this year.
“We've gotten to the point where so much muscle has been cut from CDC that in order to respond to a medium or large event, it will be extremely disruptive,” Daskalakis said. “There is an apparent view that we'll still be able to function at the high level expected by the American people. But that's not going to be the case. They continue to cut deeply into muscle, and soon all that's going to be left is bone and articulations that won't be able to do the work.”
Beyond concerns about the public health implications, some RIF’d CDC employees are also aghast at what they see as outright cruelty on display in the cuts.
Employees pointed, as an example, to the elimination of the Employee Assistance Program and layoffs in the Work-Life Wellness and Occupational Health and Safety Offices, which provided counseling and therapeutic support to CDC staff, many of whom are not only suffering the impacts of the layoffs but also still reeling from the shooting at CDC headquarters earlier this year.
“We've taken blow after blow after blow, it’s been psychological warfare,” a RIF’d employee reflected on the current mood at CDC. “I realized they really just didn't care about what happened to us as an agency, and that they are not looking to us to make sure that the public is healthy and safe that they don't really want to know.”
An administration official who declined to speak on-the-record confirmed the cuts to the work-life wellness program but disputed their severity in the occupational health office. The official would not comment on the impact of those cuts on mental health support for employees still impacted by the shooting.
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‘I can’t do it’: Some laid-off workers say they’re done for good
As the political and legal battles over RIFs continue, some ousted CDC workers face a new dilemma: if their layoffs were reversed, be it by court order or the administration once again recalling fired workers, would they go back?
The question became more salient Wednesday afternoon, when a federal judge in California moved to temporarily block the Trump administration from pursuing additional RIFs during the shutdown. Whether her order retroactively applied to employees already subject to RIFs remained unclear; further details in a written ruling were expected later Wednesday.
Pressed by Scripps News about whether they’d return to the CDC in the event they could, RIF’d employees expressed mixed feelings.
"Do I want to continue to work in this organization if it's going to be like that, I don't know,” one CDC worker confided. “I don't know that mentally I could handle it. I have colleagues who have already said, ‘I can't,’ even if they say, ‘we can go back,’ ‘I can't do it. It's too stressful.’”
Concerns about the Trump administration’s impact on the federal bureaucracy were widespread, but some feared the president’s damage would long outlast him.
“Eventually, the current administration won't be there. But what are we going to be left with? And do I have the energy to put in to help pick up those pieces and see this agency through for another decade and try to get us back to the premier world health organization we were instead of the shell of what they've left us with?”
The employee trailed off before answering their own question.
Another former employee, this one subject to a RIF earlier in the year before the shutdown, said his concern was less the status of the agency than it was the oath he swore to uphold the constitution.
“The question for me is not would I take this, it's could I even go back and uphold my constitutional oath as a federal employee for my country?” the former employee said.
“As of now, I feel like I can't.”
