Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: CDC, Education, and Health Departments Hit by Mass Firings

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

Sam Stein takes on the shocking Friday night purge inside the federal government—with mass firings at the CDC, Education Department, and more—explaining what really happened, why it breaks every precedent, and why insiders need to speak up now. - Secure Tip Line: https://thebulwark.com/tips - Sam Stein’s Signal Handle: asteinindc.09

Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark. I am doing an emergency bulwark take here on Saturday. It's about 3.45 p.m. The reason we're doing this is that overnight there was some remarkable bad news involving the administration. A slew of firings across the federal government from the administration owed to the government shutdown, or at least that's what they say. A number of different agencies have been hit, and I'm going to get to a couple of those, but I really want to focus on one in particular, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is the agency that is frankly in charge of making sure that we are on lookout for diseases, that we have the proper research to deal with.

diseases when they come here and that we are doing everything we can in terms of prevention. And this administration has been taking an axe to the CDC since the get-go, RFK Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary, has had it in for the CDC owing to a longstanding gripes anti-vaccine quackery, but also what happened during COVID. He thinks the agency has lost its mind and lost its direction and lost its purpose. He also doesn't believe necessarily in combating infectious diseases. He believes in wellness and prevention and things like that. And so if you remember a couple months ago, there was a fairly dramatic firing of the CDC director by RFK Jr. because he wanted her to sign off on all of his vaccine recommendations without looking at the data. She said, no,

she resigned and then a number of other top CDC officials resigned. So that's the backdrop already to this. But last night, Friday night, the administration took a second swing of the acts at the CDC. And they went after some of the sub-agencies in ways that are kind of confounding to me. The data is coming in a little bit sporadically because not everyone is sure who actually was fired. They're technically known as RIF reduction in forces. But we've been able to cobble together some of this stuff and it's pretty remarkable. So I'm just going to read through some of the stuff I know, through sources, and then some of the stuff that's been reported elsewhere. Among those who have been hit by the firings, which have been described as a

bloodbath, basically, and a Friday night massacre by people who are both at the CDC and aware of it, the leadership at the Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, that would be the acting director and the chief medical officer of that center, among other top officials. not gone, fired. In addition, the leadership at the Global Health Center, the people who are responsible for responding to the measles outbreak, you might be saying yourself, wait a second, that can't be right. We actually are having measles outbreaks in this country for the first time in a long time. Why would we want to get rid of the person who is responsible for monitoring measles outbreaks? I don't know. It's crazy, but we have just apparently pushed out leadership

who's responsible for that. We have people who have been leading our response to outbreaks of Ebola as well, who are part of the list of folks who got rift. Now, you might be saying, wait, hold on. In 2014, there was a global Ebola epidemic. It was incredibly scary. It shocked our country. We went to panic.

Why would we want to do that? Well, I guess apparently Ebola's done a thing anymore. There's what's called a morbidity and mortality weekly report, which the CDC puts out, and basically they monitor what's going on around the country in terms of outbreaks and things like that and diseases. Believe historically, correct me if wrong, it was probably the first publication that in the 80s noticed what looked to be a fairly shocking disease developing that later became known as AIDS, which was good.

It's important to take note of these things and try to get ahead of it. I think workers for the MMWR are now Rift. like I said, a bunch of HR people. In fact, this is a kind of crazy one. I was told by a person that the CDC's HR department, which is currently furloughed because of the

government shutdown, which means they can't work, but they're still employed. I was told that they had to be unfurloughed to go back to work so that they could process the firings of their colleagues. Talked about messed up. Jesus. I was also told

that it wasn't just, as noted, people who were furloughed who were Rift. It was people who were currently working, which means there are, by definition, essential personnel who were Rift, which doesn't quite make sense. But that's the situation. Again, people are still picking up the pieces here.

A few other tibits that I know, people at the Office of Smoking and Health at the National Center for Chronic Disease and Prevention and Health, gone. Smoking kind of matters as a public health matter. People at the Division of Violence Prevention at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, gone. You would think that that's an important office. It's just, it's a shocking situation.

People are really amazed by what's happening. They were already fairly despondent with the current situation in the administration. Obviously, morale is just terrible there right now. But this is bringing it to a different, different level. I guess it's worth sort of backing up and being like, well, how did we get here? Why are they doing this? Basic situation is this. Government shut down at the end of September.

The administration led by OMB director Russ Vaugh was like, if you shut down, we're going to fire all these people. And Democrats, and some Republicans said, that's ridiculous. Don't do it. It doesn't make any sense. We've never fired federal workers during a shutdown before. You can and can furlough them, obviously. And that's standard practice. And then that means when the government reopens, they come back and to work.

and for a couple weeks now, no, 11 days now. Russ Vaux and the administration have not acted on this. And then on Friday, they just decided to act on this. And my assumption is that they're going to say, well, you know, this is the Democrats' fault. They just reopened the government. Then none of this would happen and this is the consequence and so on and so forth. But that's bullshit. It's just bullshit.

I mean, again, every single time there's been a shutdown in the past, they've not. fired federal employees. They just haven't. They furloughed them. And in this instance, they are firing federal employees because they have a larger project that they want to fulfill. I think there's a reason that you see the CDC being targeted. It's because people like RFK Jr. want to target it. And they're using this as an opportunity to target it. There's other places, too. The Department of Education, for instance, apparently is taking it on the chin. One report said that, I'm just according to the education department layoffs continued overnight with the main office in charge of special ed funding being, quote, decimated, as one person described.

Quote, they cut just about everyone that works with IDEA funding. I'm not sure how these programs exist moving forward. I mean, is that what we're doing here? We're just going to shut down special ed funding? That's part of this shutdown? It's shocking, honestly. And they're just using this as a pretext to go after domestic programs that they've never wanted to fund in the first place. I should say the CDC stuff is really alarming. And that is for obvious reasons. It doesn't take

a genius to recognize that at any moment in time, an outbreak can happen. And we want to not just get our hands on it. We want to get ahead of it. We want to make sure that we're monitoring it so that we don't get stuck with the consequences. Outbreaks are happening. We have a measles outbreak in this country. And global pandemics have a acute way of getting onshore. And you know who knows, this is Donald Trump, because his presidency, the first term, ended with the COVID pandemic. So it looks like we're just going to go into this blind a little bit and with a decimated workforce in an agency with incredibly low morale and lacking the institutional expertise that had made it a leading agency for preventative health and infectious disease research in the world. and that's just the way it is and you just got to hope for the pest

but boy this is ominous to say the least. We'll see what else happens with these rifts but if you are aware of what's going on obviously we want to hear from you go to our tip line and that's the

bulwark.com slash tips it's secure. Let us know what you're hearing especially if you're inside the CDC or any other government agency please we want to hear from you I'm also going to do something a little bit different now. I'm going to give you my signal handle in case you're a government official and want to use it and get in touch. It's a Stein in D.C. 0.09. A Stein in D.C. dot 09.

hit me up if you have any tips about what the hell is going on. The best way to deal with this and push back on it is to put light on it. So if you have good tips, if you have good documents from inside the government about what's going on, send them our way. Thank you for watching. Subscribe to the feed and we'll be in touch. Bye.