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The cadre of elite disease detectives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to be left in ruin today as the Trump administration continues to slash the federal workforce.
Many members of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, EIS—a globally revered public health training program—were informed earlier Friday that they were about to be fired, according to reporting from Stat News. Multiple sources told CBS News that half of EIS officers are among the ongoing cuts.
The Trump administration is ousting thousands of probationary federal workers in a wide-scale effort to dramatically slim agencies.
The EIS is a two-year program filled with competitively selected, highly educated and trained experts. EIS officers are the ones deployed in critical public health situations, such as deadly outbreaks or bioterror attacks. The program has a long, rich history since its establishment in 1951, which includes contributing to the eradication of smallpox, among other achievements.
The deep cuts to the program have horrified those in the public health sphere.
“The country is less safe,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, a former top-ranking CDC official and alumna of the program, told CBS News. “These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika.”
“It’s almost beyond belief,” former CDC director Bill Foege told Stat. He noted that the EIS trainees were critical to stopping the spread of the disastrous West Africa Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016.
The cuts to EIS are just some of those that CDC is facing. CBS News reports that around 1,270 are being cut from the agency, which is around 10 percent of its staff.
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