CDC scraps plan to help Texas schools curb measles over layoffs, employee says
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has scrapped a plan to offer help curbing measles in Texas schools after some staff working on the agency's response to this year's
record outbreak
of the virus were warned they could face layoffs, an agency employee said.
CDC officials
had initially weighed expanding a service they had been offering to hospitals in Texas — onsite assessments to root out how errors in ventilation and air filtration could be enabling spread of the virus – to other kinds of facilities like schools as well.
"Being on the ground allows us to actually look at the filters that are in place, look at the HVAC systems, how they're set up, how they're being used, how they're being monitored. And after seeing what we did, I'm glad we did," Dylan Neu, who had led the CDC's ventilation assessments in Texas, told CBS News.
Neu is a biomedical engineer for the CDC's National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH,
which was largely eliminated
by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s
first wave of layoffs
earlier this month.
Two experts from NIOSH — Neu and an industrial hygienist — were first sent to Texas on March 20 at the state's request. They found a number of issues at hospitals in Texas that had been actively treating measles patients during the outbreak, Neu said.
The agency's teams do careful inspections of the hospital's facilities, assessing how air is moving, he said, which can be difficult to accurately do over the phone with people unfamiliar with the technical details of how HVAC systems work.
In one example, an isolation room at a hospital was found to have been pressurized wrongly, with air flowing out of the room with the measles patient, Neu said. Another hospital had skipped a key step in setting up an air filter in their waiting room: unwrapping the filter before turning it on.
"They might say in an interview, 'Yeah, we purchased HEPA filters. They've been running in the waiting room.' But if they're not actually out of the plastic bag, they're not doing what they think they're doing," Neu said.
While Neu remains on the job for now, he received a notice on April 1 warning him to expect to be laid off by HHS in the coming weeks.
"This action is necessary to align our workforce with the agency's current and future needs and to ensure the efficient and effective operation of our programs," Neu's notice from the department said.
Neu said he received the notice while in his hotel room in Texas, as he prepared to return from his deployment. Most of his colleagues and the leadership above him within NIOSH have either been laid off, offered reassignments to other agencies or warned to expect cuts.
"My current understanding is that I'll be working in the office until the end of this month, and then I'll be on 60 days administrative leave until June 30th, and then we'll be separated at that point," he said.
Agency officials scrapped plans to offer future ventilation assessments to Texas, he said, because of the prospect that he might get laid off while in the field and cut off from the agency's systems.
A CDC spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While much of the work Neu's team does at NIOSH is research, he said that experts on his team have often been tapped to deploy to emergency responses as the agency's primary experts on topics like ventilation and contamination.
He recounted several past deployments, ranging from helping hospitals around the country draw up plans to prepare for
Ebola cases
during the Obama administration, to helping the agency's quarantine station at Detroit's airport build an isolation room to screen passengers early during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We're involved in pretty much every response the CDC is involved in. Especially if there's some sort of engineering or ventilation component, NIOSH gets called in as that scientific expertise," he said.
The layoffs have also upended other work done by NIOSH to respond to requests like health hazard evaluations, where workplaces can call on the agency for help investigating health issues on the job, like
cancer clusters
or
fungal outbreaks
.
Impact on the
CDC's measles response
also goes beyond NIOSH. CBS News previously reported that multiple agency staff assigned to the effort had been let go.
An official said Tuesday that the CDC was now "scraping to find the resources and personnel needed to provide support" to Texas and other states now facing outbreaks.
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Fast Company
2 hours ago
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According to the notice posted on the FDA's website, the recalled eggs were distributed between February and May. The retail locations that received the eggs include: Walmart Save Mart FoodMaxx Lucky Smart & Final Safeway Raleys Food 4 Less Ralphs The eggs were distributed between February 3 and May 15, 2025, to Save Mart, FoodMaxx, Lucky, Smart & Final, Safeway, Raleys, Food 4 Less, and Ralphs locations in California and Nevada. Those eggs had sell-by dates ranging from March 4 to June 4, 2025. The eggs were also distributed between February 3 through May 6, 2025, to Walmart stores in California, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nebraska, Indiana, and Illinois. Those eggs had sell-by dates ranging from March 4 to June 19, 2025. What eggs are included in the recall? Over two dozen egg products packaged under multiple brands are included in the recall. The recall notice states that the eggs were packaged in fiber or plastic cartons and have a plant code number P-6562 or CA5330 with the Julian Dates between 32 to 126. Photographs of the cartons can be found here. 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The firings, layoffs and voluntary departures under President Donald Trump are colliding with persistent shortcomings in federal policies that largely prevent the government from responding to extreme heat as it does for other events. Advertisement Heat is not identified as a disaster in the U.S., so federal funding is limited, although agencies have recently begun to cooperate on efforts to warn the public about its dangers. Now, as temperatures climb sharply across regions of the country, key offices that once employed heat experts are empty. The departures and funding cuts will leave the government unable to respond as quickly or effectively to heat waves, said Juli Trtanj, who was executive director of the multiagency task force known as the National Integrated Heat Health Information System, or NIHHIS, until May, when she retired from NOAA. She co-chaired the task force with experts from the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and FEMA. All of them are gone. 'What has been lost is the ability to actually help people understand what heat means for them and what to do about it,' Trtanj told POLITICO's E&E News. 'There is so much institutional knowledge that has just walked out the door.' People sit outside a New York City cooling center for the elderly during a heat wave last year. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images NOAA did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for HHS, Vianca Rodríguez Feliciano, said the department is 'fully committed to addressing the urgent public health challenges of extreme heat by protecting vulnerable populations and mitigating health risks.' 'The Department remains focused on delivering timely, science-based interventions to safeguard communities nationwide,' she said in a statement, without providing details. Shortly after she responded to E&E News' inquiry, a key federal heat planning document was taken offline last week. 'Big health impacts' Although heat is the biggest weather-related killer in the nation, the government has been slow to respond to high temperatures. That began to change in 2015 — at the outset of the hottest decade ever recorded by humans. NIHHIS was founded at the close of the Obama administration to consolidate the expertise of heat specialists from 20 agencies. Its structure and mission is modeled after efforts to address drought. As former President Joe Biden emphasized a whole-of-government approach to climate change, NIHHIS worked to develop online tools like HeatRisk and the Heat Health Tracker — both of which explain how temperature forecasts can affect human health. Those tools are valuable for local emergency planners as they decide when to open cooling centers. Health care workers also use them to prepare for surges in heat-related illnesses. 'We had generated a lot of internal knowledge about each agency's capabilities and how CDC could use NOAA data on heat waves to track hospitalizations and predict where there were going to be big health impacts,' said Jenny Keroack, a former HHS employee who was part of NIHHIS. She now works at the nonprofit Healthcare Without Harm. Last spring, NIHHIS established two 'centers for excellence' dedicated to researching heat, each funded through multimillion-dollar NOAA grants. One of them, the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring based in North Carolina, was supposed to help communities map heat islands. The other, the Center for Resilient Communities, would have been based in California and Arizona to help localities identify ways to respond to extreme heat. NIHHIS' expertise was so sought-after that federal workers including Trtanj started helping the United Nations' World Health Organization set up a similar system globally. Both centers were short-circuited by Trump's policies. In July, a separate heat working group convened by the Biden administration published the first-ever National Heat Strategy, which pushed for 'solidifying' NIHHIS over the next six years to help develop more solutions to keep people safe. The document was taken off government websites last week but remains accessible through the Internet Archive. NIHHIS spent the fall preparing for this summer through 'table-top exercises,' to establish what each agency's role should be during heat waves. It was the first time that kind of coordination had occurred. 'There wasn't yet a good plan of what happens in a heat wave — the weather service issues a heat warning, and then what? Does that trigger something at OSHA or FEMA?' Trtanj said, referring to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 'It was finally building, we were finally making plans and deploying experts and money to communities to help build resilience during the end of the Biden administration,' said one former federal worker involved in NIHHIS who was granted anonymity to speak about internal planning. People cool off in misters during a heat wave in Las Vegas last year. | John Locher/AP As the Biden administration was coming to a close, NIHHIS members had started talking about under what circumstances the government would issue a public health emergency for extreme heat, Keroack said. The work was being noticed in Congress. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced legislation in January that would ensure NIHHIS couldn't be dismantled without congressional approval. It would also authorize $5 million annually to the program for data collection. A House version of the bill has been introduced by Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.). 'Unable to actually function' Days after Trump's election, a co-chair of the group, John Balbus, was put on administrative leave when HHS shuttered its Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. Balbus led the HHS climate office. FEMA's representative to NIHHIS took the deferred resignation offer, the fork, shortly afterward, according to people familiar with his decision. Then, on April Fool's Day, HHS sent reduction-in-force notices to the CDC's entire Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice. The layoffs included the agency's climate office, and the employee who had been a co-chair of NIHHIS. Heat experts from the Small Business Administration, CDC's National Institute of Occupational Health and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program have also been laid off under Trump. 'My calendar used to be triple booked, and all of a sudden I had days with literally no meetings because there was no one left to meet with,' Trtanj said. 'We were unable to actually function in anything other than putting a forecast out.' NIHHIS workers had watched the 2024 presidential election closely. Trtanj said the group was aware of the changes that Project 2025 had proposed for NOAA, including cutting the climate office where Trtanj was working. Before Trump was inaugurated, the team tried to pivot away from climate change, focusing instead on areas Trump had emphasized during the campaign, like heat's impact on agriculture and small businesses. 'We knew there would be changes, but the way it happened was a huge surprise,' Trtanj said. 'It's not that we didn't have a seat at the table, we didn't even know where the table was to make the case for this program and how heat work was important outside of climate work.' Motorists drive past a sign in Los Angeles warning of extreme heat. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images She took early retirement in April in part because of her colleagues' exodus. But there was another reason: She was told she couldn't attend the launch of the World Health Organization's OneHealth program modeled off NIHHIS in Geneva. The event is happening this month. 'I did not see that I would be able to be effective in saving lives working for the federal government, so I decided to leave and see what I could do from the outside,' Trtanj told POLITICO's E&E News in a video call from Switzerland. Trtanj's last day at NOAA was April 30. Five days later, the agency canceled its grants for the NIHHIS Centers of Excellence for heat. 'They are cutting programs that are not really easy for state or local governments to replicate, and that can have drastic consequences and cause peoples' lives,' said Ladd Keith, who directs the Heat Resilience Institute at the University of Arizona and was a co-lead for one of the heat centers before the grant was terminated. He was told the funding for his center had been cut one day before they were supposed to announce that 15 communities across the country had been selected to receive help from the center for coping with heat this summer. 'It's heart-breaking that we can't assist them with the resources we wanted to this summer,' Keith said. Keroack, the former HHS official, said the one-two punch of funding cuts and firings will leave U.S. residents more vulnerable when heat waves strike in the coming weeks. 'Most agencies and offices that work on heat response, they are less equipped now than they were a year ago, and it scares me to think about what that means this summer,' she said. Former NOAA climate scientist Tom DiLiberto said the personnel purge at NIHHIS could reverberate beyond Trump's presidency. 'These cuts, they're inevitably going to be felt — not necessarily let's say this season, but next season and the next and a decade from now,' he said. 'Because we know the efforts to drive change and build resilience can't happen overnight. It takes consistent investment to help build that resilience so that we can eventually save people and help people survive some of these extreme heat events.' Chelsea Harvey contributed reporting. Reach the author on signal at Awitt.40
