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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is tackling one of the most severe Ebola outbreaks ever recorded, urging its staff to assist in curbing the virus’s spread abroad.
However, the CDC personnel involved in these efforts are experiencing significant burnout and low morale due to substantial staffing reductions and prolonged leadership gaps, as revealed by internal documents and discussions with Federal News Network.
The CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), tasked with preventing and managing rare but lethal diseases such as anthrax and Ebola, along with more widespread illnesses like foodborne diseases, is central to the outbreak response.
The response is being conducted on two fronts. Domestically, CDC staff are conducting Ebola screenings at multiple airports. Globally, they are collaborating with health ministries in other nations to track and contain the outbreak.
In a recording acquired by Federal News Network, acting NCEZID director Chris Braden urged employees during a May 28 meeting to volunteer for frontline Ebola response duties, noting that staffing airport passenger screenings is one of the agency’s “immediate needs.”
“This response is going to last for quite some time,” Braden informed employees. “I expect it will only grow larger. The response itself, and the number of deployers needed, may increase.”
Recent CDC analyses indicate this Ebola outbreak could become the worst on record. Yet the CDC is asking NCEZID employees to step up despite widespread morale issues. In an all-staff survey with input from 340 employees, 50% of respondents reported their personal workplace morale as “somewhat low” or “very low.”
Another 31% of respondents indicated their morale was “neither high nor low.” Approximately 18% of respondents described their morale as “somewhat high” or “very high.”
“These findings clearly show that morale continues to be a major challenge for many staff members,” stated Kristen Nordlund, NCEZID’s associate director for communication science, during the meeting.
Nordlund informed staff that staffing and budget issues were “by far the primary concerns,” cited in nearly 40% of survey responses.
The CDC, like the rest of the Department of Health and Human Services, underwent significant layoffs last year and offered voluntary separation incentives to encourage staff departures. HHS reversed many of the layoffs that affected CDC employees, but recently executed a second round of reductions in force targeting employees missed during last year’s layoffs.
Federal workforce data reveals the CDC has reduced its staff by approximately 27% since fiscal year 2024. Job security and concerns about additional layoffs were a “close second” among top concerns in the internal survey, appearing in a quarter of employees’ written responses. Despite these external pressures, about 90% of survey participants expressed pride in NCEZID’s work.
“High morale regarding the nature of the work; low morale due to the challenging organizational constraints in carrying it out,” wrote an anonymous NCEZID employee in one response, included in an NCEZID presentation shared with Federal News Network.
Staff also expressed concerns about uncertainty surrounding CDC leadership and further attempts to restructure the agency. The Trump administration, in its fiscal 2027 budget proposal, is once again requesting Congress to merge several major agencies and programs into a new Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), championed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The AHA would combine programs from the CDC, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. As part of this consolidation, the administration plans to reduce spending by $5 billion across these programs.
HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard stated in a release that the CDC “remains fully capable of protecting Americans and responding to emerging public health threats through its world-class scientists, public health professionals, and emergency response teams.”
Hilliard said the department has “responded aggressively” to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, as well as an outbreak of the Andes virus, also known as hantavirus. CDC experts, she added, are deployed both domestically and internationally to address the situation.
“The department continues to function effectively through its experienced career officials, senior leadership, and public health experts, while the Trump Administration continues to recruit highly qualified individuals to serve across HHS,” she said.
The CDC is managing all of this without permanent leadership. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is overseeing the CDC on an interim basis, but has exceeded his official tenure as its “acting director” as defined under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. There is also currently no permanent head of the Food and Drug Administration or permanent surgeon general.
Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, a former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, voiced concerns about the agency’s leadership and staffing gaps in a recent call with reporters.
“I spent my career tracking outbreaks. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is creating them right now,” Rodriguez said.
Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said over 80% of CDC center directors are being led by acting officials. Daskalakis resigned from the CDC last summer following the dismissal of its former director, Susan Monarez.
“The result is a patchwork of vacancies at the CDC that lacks any coherent pattern. This isn’t a strategy for rebuilding an agency. There was no deliberate planning. The staffing gaps you see at the CDC mean there’s no one available to perform the essential disease detective work,” Daskalakis said.
HHS is currently recruiting for approximately 12,000 positions, which would reverse the staffing reductions implemented last year. Daskalakis, however, cautioned that a “public health workforce cannot be rebuilt overnight.”
“Preparedness relies on people. You can have plans on paper, but without experienced epidemiologists, data teams, and field staff, everything falls apart when it’s needed most,” he said.
Peggy Honein, director of NCEZID’s Infectious Disease Readiness & Innovation division, informed staff during the internal meeting that the Ebola response is being coordinated across the federal government, primarily handled by the CDC, the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, and the State Department.
According to the CDC, there are more than 800 confirmed Ebola cases and 180 confirmed deaths. The majority of cases and deaths have occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while some cases and deaths have also been reported in Uganda.
“What we truly need is more on-the-ground intelligence to understand what’s happening in the D.R. Congo, and that is extremely difficult right now in the affected region of the country,” Honein said. “We really want to ensure we have adequate technical and operational support to lead this Ebola response, which will undoubtedly be a marathon given the number of cases we’re seeing at this point,” Honein said.
Regarding the timeline for the ongoing response, Honein said “we expect this to continue for many months,” estimating it will likely last another six to 12 months.
“Just want to set expectations about the need for staffing, and the need for us to balance that between the work in our home divisions and the work required for the response,” Honein said.
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email jheckman@federalnewsnetwork.com, or reach out on Signal at jheckman.29
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