When Leslie Ross and her colleagues found out their research roles at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were being cut in early April, they panicked.
Ross, a former researcher at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, said she and her colleagues had scrambled to align their research in commercial tobacco prevention with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s priorities once he was confirmed, to ensure their work would continue. But weeks later she received an email letting her know she had been placed on administrative leave.
“We were told that cuts were coming, but what really shocked us was that our entire division was entirely cut,” said Ross of Decatur. “It wasn’t like certain people in certain roles. It was like the Office on Smoking and Health doesn’t exist anymore.”
Ross is one of tens of thousands of federal employees who have been placed on administrative leave, left their jobs or been fired since President Donald Trump took office. It’s part of the president’s and Elon Musk’s cost-cutting and government-shrinking operation, DOGE, which they say is aimed at rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced in March it would lay off about 10,000 people as part of a broad push to shrink and reorganize the government. And the CDC, which is part of HHS, reportedly has lost 2,400 of its 12,000 employees.
Former federal employees like Ross who have been placed on administrative leave are navigating the labor market with a narrowly tailored skill set that doesn’t always directly translate to jobs in the private sector.
“Everyone is kind of worried that there just aren’t going to be public health jobs available, or at least not in the way that we’ve been used to in the past,” Ross said.
At the CDC, she researched health equity, focusing on how certain groups of people are disproportionately targeted and harmed by the tobacco industry, contributing to health disparities between communities. Ross studied what interventions worked to prevent disparities.
Ross said if she were offered her job back, she’s unsure if she’d take it.
Ever since being laid off, she’s been looking for work elsewhere, but the clock is ticking. Her 60 days of remaining pay end in June.
And it’s not just workers in the CDC.
DJ Fontenot of Decatur started working at the Environmental Protection Agency in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in September. Within that office, he was primarily responsible for managing grants for the EPA. But in February, he and his co-workers were placed on administrative leave and were later reinstated pending legal challenges. On Monday, they were notified by email that they would be laid off on June 31.
Since February, Fontenot has been seeking work in the public sector, where he and his former colleagues are all vying for the same jobs.
“A lot of us do have different backgrounds, but at the end of the day, if we want to continue doing any sort of environmental justice work, there are so few good opportunities for that,” he said.
M. Melinda Pitts, director of the Center for Human Capital Studies at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said there have been cuts to the federal workforce in the past, but nothing compares to the speed and magnitude of the layoffs during Trump’s second term. That makes it difficult to assess their impact.
Pitts said it’s still too early to tell how these layoffs will affect the labor market. The most recent data in Georgia shows that the unemployment rate at 3.6% in March and has remained relatively stable for the past 10 months.
Some employees who were nearing the end of their careers retired, but for those who plan to stay in the workforce, job prospects in the private sector could depend on how specialized their skill sets are, Pitts said.
“The more specialized they are with specific types of research or jobs, the harder it is going to be to find a job,” she said.
In Georgia, 1.6% of employees work for the federal government, which is just above the national average, according to labor data from September 2024. That’s largely because the CDC is headquartered in Atlanta.
While a relatively small percentage of the overall workforce, the federal government is the largest employer in the country. In an analysis published in the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Policy Hub, Pitts wrote that she expects the cuts in the federal workforce to start appearing in labor statistics this summer.
While former federal employees are on the job hunt, local governments are recruiting. Fulton County launched a program guaranteeing former federal employees who reside in the county an interview to fill about 800 vacant full- and part-time positions across the county, Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts said last month.
“Some say you’re fired; I say you’re hired,” he said.
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