Some Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees who received termination notices were later told that they are not being dismissed, according to the CDC’s parent agency.
“The employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told The Epoch Times in an Oct. 12 email.
HHS did not respond to a request for more information, including how many CDC employees were wrongly informed they were being laid off.
The filing did not provide the number of terminated CDC employees.
In a contingency plan released ahead of the government shutting down due to a lack of appropriations from Congress, HHS said that it would furlough about 41 percent of its 79,717 workers if a shutdown happened. It said that compensation for the others, which includes workers needed to protect life and property, such as CDC employees who monitor for disease outbreaks, is financed outside of the appropriations.
Some functions, including CDC communication, would be hampered by the funding lapse, the agency also said.
Officials with the American Federation of Government Employees told news outlets that approximately 1,300 CDC workers received termination notices on Oct. 10. Within 24 hours, they said, about 700 employees had been informed they were not being terminated.
Earlier in the year, 2,473 CDC workers were let go as part of an HHS restructuring plan, according to a Senate panel. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in April that officials reversed some initial layoffs because they had terminated some workers who should not have been let go.
“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” Everett Kelly, national president of the union, said in a statement.
The federation and other unions in September sued the government over its reduction-in-force plans, alleging that carrying out mass terminations during the shutdown would violate federal law.
They later asked a judge to halt agencies from firing workers, saying that HHS required employees to work over the weekend to keep issuing reduction-in-force notices to CDC employees.
Administration officials told the judge overseeing the case that the case is faulty in part because agencies have the authority to engage in mass terminations.
A hearing is set to take place on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.
Jack Phillips contributed to this report.