The White House Is Already Walking Back Hundreds of Federal Layoffs

A rally at the main campus of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, April 1, 2025.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty

In Donald Trump’s second term, federal workers have gotten used^[2] to being fired and re-hired^[3], and, in some cases, even fired again. As one probationary employee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told me^[4] earlier this year, working for this administration is “emotionally very turbulent.”

This weekend, scores more federal workers are feeling the whiplash. After Project 2025 architect Russell Vought^[5], director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), announced^[6] on Friday that the government had started issuing reduction in force (RIF) notices to federal employees more than a week into the ongoing government shutdown, approximately 4,000 federal workers were laid off, as my colleague Tim Murphy wrote^[7] yesterday. Reports suggest^[8] that the RIFs primarily targeted HUD, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Treasury Department.

But already, hundreds of those fired employees have reportedly been reinstated.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing more than 800,000 federal and Washington, DC, government employees, told^[9] 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^[10] CDC’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, its incident commander for measles response, staff working on the Ebola response^[11] in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and staff at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CNN and Politico report^[12]. An anonymous HHS official told^[13] some news outlets that these staffers were mistakenly fired through a “coding error.”

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^[14] yesterday, before the news had broken of the White H0use walking back hundreds of layoffs:

The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Report is not just any old morbidity and mortality report—it’s a key part of America’s public health apparatus, something that has been published in some form by the government for almost 150 years^[15]. The most recent edition is titled^[16], “Tularemia Antimicrobial Treatment and Prophylaxis: CDC Recommendations for Naturally Acquired Infections and Bioterrorism Response.” I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of public-health information you want to outsource to TikTok.

So the un-firing of these people generally seems like a good thing. But as former CDC senior official Dr. Demetre Daskalakis told^[17] the New York Times on Saturday, the harms of the government’s slapdash approach cannot be entirely undone. “I’m happy people are back,” Daskalakis told the newspaper, “but this damage is not easy to repair both for current staff and for people who will lead public health in the future.”

On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance told^[18] host Margaret Brennan that the layoffs were the Democrats’ fault, and said the shutdown “inevitably leads to some chaos,” which he also blamed on Democrats.

The AFGE also said^[21] in a post on X that it had filed a lawsuit in response to the RIFs. A spokesperson for the union, and spokespeople for the White House and HHS, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.