On Oct. 10, HHS laid off more than a thousand employees at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), coinciding with the government shutdown that began earlier in the month. While it reinstated 600 staff within 24 hours, citing “data discrepancies and processing errors,” the planning division responsible for designing and coordinating the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) were not recalled.
“The recent layoffs of the entire Planning Branch within CDC’s Division of Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys threaten future NHANES cycles and the nation’s ability to monitor and understand critical health and nutrition trends,” the American Society for Nutrition (ASN) shared in a statement at the time. “Without them, this foundational resource and the evidence it provides for science, policy and public health are at risk.”
Launched in the early 1970s, NHANES grew out of earlier National Center for Health Statistics efforts to assess the health of the U.S. population. It is now a cornerstone of U.S. public health infrastructure—used to evaluate the evolving health and nutritional status of adults and children across decades and the nation through a combination of interviews, physical examinations and lab tests conducted at mobile examination centers.
The rescission follows advocacy by ASN, which called for recognition of NHANES’ critical role in the nation’s health and nutrition research enterprise, and by federal employee unions that argued that RIF procedures do not apply to emergency shutdown furloughs.
Though numbers are difficult to verify due to conflicting reports and reinstatements, the CDC has lost around 3,000 employees, equivalent to approximately a quarter of its staff, since the Trump administration took office in January.
