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A rally at the main campus of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, April 1, 2025.<\/span>Elijah Nouvelage\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In Donald Trump\u2019s <\/span>second term, federal workers have gotten used<\/a> to being fired and re-hired<\/a>, and, in some cases, even fired again<\/em>. As one probationary employee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told me<\/a> earlier this year, working for this administration is \u201cemotionally very turbulent.\u201d<\/p>\n This weekend, scores more federal workers are feeling the whiplash. After Project 2025 architect Russell Vought<\/a>, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), announced<\/a> on Friday that the government had started issuing reduction in force (RIF) notices to federal employees more than a week into the ongoing <\/strong>government shutdown, approximately 4,000 federal workers were laid off, as my colleague Tim Murphy wrote<\/a> yesterday. Reports suggest<\/a> that the RIFs primarily targeted HUD, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Treasury Department.<\/p>\n But already, hundreds of those fired employees have reportedly been reinstated. <\/p>\n The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing more than 800,000 federal and Washington, DC, government employees, told<\/a> CNN on Sunday that of the approximately 1,300 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) workers who received RIF notices on Friday, about 700 were reinstated on Saturday. Among the staffers fired and reinstated were those who publish<\/a> CDC\u2019s weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, its incident commander for measles response, staff working on the Ebola response<\/a> in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and staff at the\u00a0National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CNN and Politico report<\/a>. An anonymous HHS official told<\/a> some news outlets that these staffers were mistakenly fired through a \u201ccoding error.\u201d<\/p>\n To give a sense of the importance of the highly skilled workforce the government accidentally eliminated and is now scrambling to restore, consider what Tim wrote<\/a> yesterday, before the news had broken of the White H0use walking back hundreds of layoffs:<\/p>\n The CDC\u2019s Morbidity and Mortality Report is not just any old morbidity and mortality report\u2014it\u2019s a key part of America\u2019s public health apparatus, something that has been published in some form by the government for\u00a0almost 150 years<\/a>. The most recent edition is\u00a0titled<\/a>, \u201cTularemia Antimicrobial Treatment and Prophylaxis: CDC Recommendations for Naturally Acquired Infections and Bioterrorism Response.\u201d I don\u2019t know what that means, but it doesn\u2019t sound like the kind of public-health information you want to outsource to TikTok.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So the un-firing of these people generally seems like a good thing. But as former CDC senior official Dr. Demetre Daskalakis told<\/a> the New York Times<\/em> on Saturday, the harms of the <\/strong>government\u2019s slapdash approach cannot be entirely undone. \u201cI\u2019m happy people are back,\u201d Daskalakis told the newspaper, \u201cbut this damage is not easy to repair both for current staff and for people who will lead public health in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n On CBS\u2019 Face the Nation <\/em>on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance told<\/a> host Margaret Brennan that the layoffs were the Democrats\u2019 fault, and said the shutdown \u201cinevitably leads to some chaos,\u201d which he also blamed on Democrats.<\/p>\n\n