The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is responding to one of the worst Ebola outbreaks on record, calling on its workforce to help contain its spread overseas.
But the CDC employees carrying out these response efforts are feeling burnout and low morale amid deep staffing cuts and long-term leadership vacancies, according to internal documents and conversations shared with Federal News Network.
CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), which is responsible for the prevention and control of rare but deadly diseases like anthrax and Ebola, as well as more common illnesses like foodborne diseases, is playing a major role in the outbreak response.
Its response is playing out on two fronts. In the United States, CDC employees are screening for Ebola at several airports. Internationally, it’s partnering with the ministries of health of other countries to monitor and contain the Ebola outbreak.
In a recording obtained by Federal News Network, acting NCEZID director Chris Braden encouraged employees in a May 28 meeting to volunteer for frontline Ebola response work, adding that getting staff to screen passengers at airports is one of the agency’s “immediate needs.”
“This is going to be a response that goes on for quite a long time,” Braden told employees. “I anticipate it’s only going to get bigger. The response itself, deployers that are needed, may get bigger.”
Recent CDC analyses show this Ebola outbreak could become the worst on record. But the CDC is asking NCEZID employees to step up amid widespread morale problems. In an all-staff survey with feedback from 340 employees, 50% of respondents said their personal workplace morale was “somewhat low” or “very low.”
Another 31% of respondents told NCEZID that their morale was “neither high nor low.” About 18% of respondents said their morale was “somewhat high” or “very high.”
“These results make it clear that morale remains a significant challenge for many staff,” Kristen Nordlund, the associate director for communication science at NCEZID, said in the meeting.
Nordlund told staff that staffing and budget were “by far the dominant concerns,” mentioned in nearly 40% of survey responses.
CDC, like the rest of the Department of Health and Human Services, went through major layoffs last year and encouraged staff to leave the agency through voluntary separation incentives. HHS walked back many of the reductions in force that targeted CDC employees, but recently conducted a second-round RIF impacting employees the department missed during last year’s layoffs.
Federal workforce data shows the CDC has cut its staffing by about 27% since fiscal 2024. Job security and fear of additional RIFs were a “close second” for top concerns in the internal survey, appearing in a quarter of employees’ written responses. Despite these outside pressures, about 90% of employees who took the survey said they were proud of the work that NCEZID does.
“High morale for the nature of the work; low morale for the difficult organizational constraints for doing it,” an anonymous NCEZID employee wrote in one response, featured in an NCEZID presentation shared with Federal News Network.
Staff also raised concerns about the uncertainty of CDC leadership and further attempts to reorganize the CDC. The Trump administration, in its fiscal 2027 budget request, is once again asking Congress to consolidate several major agencies and programs into a new Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) championed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
AHA would pull together programs within 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 cut $5 billion in spending across these programs.
HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said in a statement that CDC “remains fully equipped to protect Americans and respond 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 Andres virus, also known as hantavirus. CDC experts, she added, are deployed domestically and internationally to address the situation.
“The department continues to operate 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.
CDC is handling 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 outlined 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, raised concerns about the agency’s leadership and staffing vacancies in a recent call with reporters.
“I spent my career chasing outbreaks. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is creating them right now,” Rodriguez said.
Demetre Daskalakis, the 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 after the firing of its former director, Susan Monarez.
“The effect of that is that there is a patchwork of absences at CDC that has no rhyme nor reason. This is not the strategy of recreating an agency. There was no intentional design. The gaps that you see in staffing at CDC mean that there’s no staff there able to do the disease detective work,” Daskalakis said.
HHS is currently hiring for about 12,000 positions, which would reverse the staffing cuts it carried out last year. Daskalakis, however, warned that a “public health workforce cannot be rebuilt overnight.”
“Preparedness depends on people. You can have plans on paper, but without experienced epidemiologists … data teams, field staff, it collapses when it’s most needed,” he said.
Peggy Honein, director of NCEZID’s Infectious Disease Readiness & Innovation division, told staff in the internal meeting that Ebola response is being coordinated across the federal government — handled largely by 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. A majority of cases and deaths occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while some cases and deaths have also been reported in Uganda.
“What we really need is more on-the-ground intelligence to know what’s happening in D.R. Congo, and that is extraordinarily difficult right now in the area of the country that’s impacted,” Honein said. “We really want to make sure we have sufficient technical and operational support to lead this Ebola response, and what will definitely be a marathon with the number of cases we’re seeing at this point in time,” Honein said.
As far as a timeline for the ongoing response, Honein said “we expect this to go on many months,” and estimated that it will probably last another six to 12 months.
“Just want to set expectations of the need for staffing, and the need for us to balance that between the work in our home divisions and the work that needs to be done in the response,” Honein said.
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