Federal workforce layoffs hit NYC health department

Mass layoffs in the federal workforce have hit home in New York City. City health officials confirmed on Wednesday that federal health agency layoffs included seven staffers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were assigned to work with the city health department. 

“Those seven staff are people with tremendous expertise and expertise that the health department needs,” interim Health Commissioner Michelle Morse said at a City Council hearing on Wednesday. She said that the department is trying to figure out how to retain them, but raised concerns about future losses too. “I don’t know if more layoffs from the CDC are coming, but I am worried about that.”

And the department isn’t immune from concerns about the Trump administration’s threatened cuts to federal funding to New York. Department officials said Wednesday that while the roughly $600 million of its budget that comes from federal funds has not yet been cut, it’s a possibility that weighs heavily on its leaders, including Morse.

“I think my big concern, and one concern that keeps me up at night is that our federal funding could be contingent on adhering to a new childhood vaccination schedule that we potentially disagree with,” Morse said at the hearing, which covered the department’s preparations for future public health emergencies. Morse said that if that were to happen, she would look to partners in the council, City Hall and at the state to help ensure the department could carry on providing the services that that funding supports. Crucially, that includes work on infectious disease control and emergency preparedness.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine skeptic, was confirmed as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last week, and has promised to “investigate” the childhood vaccine schedule. Despite raising concerns about federal funding being contingent on federal vaccine guidance, Morse also sought to offer reassurance that the department will continue to be able to issue its own guidance on vaccinations. “Regardless of changes at the federal level, our work at the New York City Health Department continues,” she said. “We do extensive outreach in communities across the city, including in New York City public schools, to encourage vaccination.”

Morse also said that the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization will mean receiving less information about emerging public health threats. “It puts our information and data sharing at risk,” she said. “Unfortunately, it also means that we don't have access to as much information as we normally would have.”

Morse has been serving as interim commissioner since the departure last fall of Dr. Ashwin Vasan. City Hall will soon be losing its deputy mayor who has overseen health agencies since the beginning of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom is among the four deputy mayors who resigned over the weekend in the wake of Adams’ unfolding political crisis and concerns that the mayor cut a deal to have his criminal case dropped in exchange for working with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. Adams has denied that a deal was cut.