The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is approved to hire hundreds of employees, after widespread layoffs and voluntary separation incentives led to major staffing cuts across the Department of Health and Human Services.
But so far this fiscal year, the CDC has hired just over two dozen new employees. Nine current CDC employees who spoke to Federal News Network, who all spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said the agency is focused less on making full-time hires and more on moving staff into vacant positions through temporary reassignments.
CDC has lost more than a quarter of its staff since fiscal 2024. Since late 2025, it’s been authorized by HHS to make about 900 new hires. Meanwhile, the agency is ramping up its response to several emerging public health issues — including outbreaks of Ebola and hantavirus overseas. It’s also partnered with the Agriculture Department to respond to an outbreak of the New World screwworm in the United States.
According to internal meetings shared with Federal News Network, leadership of CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases expects its domestic and international response to the Ebola outbreak overseas will last for another six to 12 months. Recent CDC analyses show this Ebola outbreak could become the worst on record.
About half of NCEZID staff who responded to a recent internal workforce survey said their morale on the job was “somewhat low” or “very low.” Only 4% of respondents said morale was “very high.” Staffing and budget concerns were by far the top issues raised by employees, mentioned in about 40% of workforce survey responses.
CDC employees told Federal News Network that temporary reassignments aren’t new for the agency. But they said it’s unusual for the agency to rely almost entirely on 120-day temporary details to address its staffing needs.
Part of CDC’s rationale, employees said, is that it’s avoiding a hiring process that would require it to give priority consideration to employees it laid off last year.
Employees said the agency is broadly using temporary details to address gaps in its public health workforce – but in some cases, those detailees haven’t been fully trained to handle the particulars of their new assignments.
One CDC employee said a senior position in their division, responsible for reviewing the scientific content of papers, presentations and web pages before publication, has been filled by a series of employees put on monthslong details.
“It requires a deep working understanding of our subject matter, which means our detailees to this position have had a steep learning curve, and this leads to delays in getting material out,” the CDC employee said.
According to a second employee, CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology is requesting details for epidemiologists, health scientists, biologists and microbiologists to assist with its response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
“This is not a staffing gap per se, but rather a normal function of emergency response at CDC,” the second CDC employee said.
At CDC’s Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, a third CDC employee said that four out of five of their team leaders are acting officials, and that “it’s been a game of musical chairs since 2025.”
A fourth CDC employee said critical leadership positions in their division have been filled by various detailees since April 2025.
“Half our empty slots are being filled by detailees,” the fourth CDC employee said.
According to employees, HHS leadership approved hiring more than 900 CDC employees, as the department embarks on a departmentwide hiring surge. But unlike the rest of HHS, CDC employees said their agency isn’t doing much hiring, because the agency would be required to give priority consideration to former employees who were laid off last year.
Agencies looking to hire following a recent reduction in force (RIF) must give employees it recently laid off priority consideration for competitive service jobs.
“CDC has yet to hire very many people at all,” a fifth CDC employee told Federal News Network. “Hiring managers have been confused why the process is so messed up. But it has made it so very few job announcements have come out for CDC.”
According to employees, other HHS components, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration, are hiring by the book, reaching out to laid-off staff on their Reemployment Priority Lists. CMS is looking to hire about 1,200 employees this year.
“This has not happened at CDC at all,” the fifth CDC employee said. “Despite what HHS and Jay Bhattacharya have said about ‘We are hiring,’ the broken mechanisms have made it impossible.”
Bhattacharya, the Senate-confirmed director of the National Institutes of Health, is also leading the CDC on an interim basis.
A sixth CDC employee said “a lot of positions” in their division are being filled by details, “while the actual job postings work their way through the approval process.”
“The details are being used more frequently and for longer periods of time, because every open position has to go through a long approval process, going all the way up to HHS at each step, for hiring of a civilian to occur,” the sixth CDC employee said.
According to two employees, the CDC in some cases has rejected workers who volunteer for details, because their offices are already short-staffed and cannot afford to lose more personnel.
“Basically, people are leaving their teams to detail, but every time it creates a new vacancy that needs to be filled, so it’s an endless circle of details,” a seventh CDC employee said. “It’s whack-a-mole, except the moles are jobs that need to be done, and the hammer is an exhausted and understaffed CDC.”
According to internal data shared with Federal News Network, CDC has posted hundreds of vacancy announcements in an internal newsletter so far this year, but almost all of them are listed as temporary details.
Governmentwide federal workforce data collected by the Office of Personnel Management shows the CDC workforce saw a net reduction of roughly 2,500 employees in fiscal 2025, and a nearly 700-employee net reduction so far this year.
Its current rate of hiring does not come close to replenishing its ranks. According to OPM’s data, CDC made 167 hires since the start of the second Trump administration. So far this fiscal year, the agency has made 29 new hires. According to OPM’s data, the CDC has posted 63 job announcements so far this year. USAJobs shows the agency is currently looking to make several new hires.
An HHS spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about CDC hiring’s metrics and staffing plans, but told Federal News Network that, “under the Trump administration, the CDC is protecting the health of the American people with the workforce needed to carry out its core mission.” The HHS spokesperson added that CDC’s staffing decisions comply with federal personnel laws and department policies. The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
After going through massive layoffs last year, HHS is on track to exceed its previous headcount. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told members of the House Appropriations Committee this spring that the department has grown its workforce to 72,000 employees and plans to hire another 12,000 new employees. Last year, HHS laid off 10,000 employees. Another 10,000 employees accepted the deferred resignation program or early retirement offers. After these cuts, the department shrank to 62,000 total full-time employees.
“We will have made up all the employees that we lost, and we’ve replaced them with a better group of people who are actually going to address chronic health,” Kennedy told the subcommittee on labor, health and human services, education and related agencies on April 17.
In March, Bhattacharya, who is performing the delegable duties of the CDC director, told employees at an all-hands meeting that the agency is looking to “shore up some of the gaps” in its workforce stemming from widespread layoffs. Bhattacharya said HHS leadership is specifically looking to resume hiring in CDC’s chronic disease operations.
“They’re going to make this a priority, because they understand, and I’ve made it very clear that it’s vital that the CDC be able to make it a priority to bring back or to fill so many of those functions with people,” he said at a CDC town hall on March 25.
CDC leadership told staff last summer that they had reinstated about a third of the 2,400 CDC employees who were laid off as part of the HHS-wide downsizing.
Employees said CDC is opting for temporary details over hiring more full-time staff because the process is taking longer with HHS leadership overseeing it.
It took federal agencies 101 days on average to hire a new employee in fiscal 2024. The Trump administration is looking to reduce governmentwide time-to-hire metrics.
Under an executive order signed last October, agencies created strategic hiring committees, which include high-level senior political appointees, to approve the filling of job vacancies.
An inspector general report found that the IRS fell short of hiring goals this year’s filing season, in part because looping the IRS and Treasury Department into the approval process led to delays. Like CDC, the IRS is relying on temporary details to address its staffing gaps.
CDC employees say almost all job postings for their divisions are listed as details, and that details are being used more frequently and for longer periods of time.
Many details have been extended beyond that initial 120-day mark, but impacted employees have been told that they’re not allowed to return to their full-time jobs yet.
According to one employee, some staff on temporary details are facing disciplinary action because their performance has declined in their new roles. That’s because newly detailed employees are sometimes unfamiliar with the work they’re now assigned to do and have received minimal training.
In some cases, the positions CDC employees have been detailed into have been recently reclassified as “at-will” jobs under Schedule Policy/Career, a rebranded version of the Schedule F designation introduced in the first Trump administration. As a result, some employees have unsuccessfully tried to end their details early.
“Some of those detail positions got a notice that it is changing to Schedule P/C,” a CDC employee said. “People are scrambling to end their details early, for those in that situation.”
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that formalized the long-expected federal employment reclassification for thousands of senior-level positions across government. Administration officials have touted the new classification as a move meant to increase accountability in the federal workforce. But federal employee unions, public-sector nonprofits and other groups warn Schedule P/C is meant to make it easier for agencies to fire employees who disagree with the administration’s policies.
In an appendix to the executive order, the White House lists more than 20 job titles at the CDC that fall under Schedule P/C. The list includes epidemiologists, health scientists, public health advisors and public health analysts. CDC human resources personnel are reclassified as Schedule P/C.
In notices obtained by Federal News Network, the CDC wrote that a public health advisor’s position was being reclassified into Schedule Policy/Career, effective June 3. CDC employees reclassified into Schedule P/C were directed to sign a second notice that states, “I understand that my service in this position will be at-will.”
About 96 CDC employees have been reclassified into Schedule Policy/Career so far, according to staff who spoke to Federal News Network.
About 8,000 federal employees across government have been reclassified as Schedule P/C – far less than OPM’s initial estimate that it would cover about 50,000 positions. Some earlier estimates had also suggested as many as 200,000 positions could be converted.
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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