'Salt in the wound': Fired CDC worker insulted by 'sketchy' email offering back her job

A laid-off worker at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to pass on returning to her dream job after receiving a "sketchy" email inviting her to come back.

Cancer outreach worker Bri McNulty was among 750 employees abruptly terminated from the CDC last month by email, and the 23-year-old had already moved on and accepted another job when she received another email offering her old job back, reported NPR.

"Yesterday morning, I had signed the offer letter," McNulty told NPR. "I signed my lease for an apartment and I was in the parking lot of FedEx to return my CDC laptop and everything."

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McNulty, who had accepted a job offer from her former employer at Penn State and was preparing to move from Iowa City, decided to check her email one last time before dropping off her laptop and saw an urgent subject line.

"Read this email immediately," it read. "You should return to duty under your previous work schedule. We apologize for any disruption this may have caused."

McNutly wasn't sure what to think about the message.

"It's sketchy, again, because the email is from a contact we don't have," she said, adding that it came from EmployeeNotifications@cdc.gov. "It's also not signed off by anyone. It just says, 'Thanks,' and that's the email, and also, the apology for any disruption this may have caused is just salt in the wound, if I'm being honest."

McNulty's boss at the CDC's Iowa Cancer Consortium, Kelly Wells Sittig, told NPR that she's heard nothing from the agency about bringing back her former employee or agency's elite Public Health Associate Program that sponsored her work.

is executive director for Iowa Cancer Consortium and had been McNulty's boss until three weeks ago. Sittig says CDC has informed her nothing about plans to bring back McNulty or the agency's elite Public Health Associate Program that sponsored her.

"There's so much uncertainty and lack of clarity not only in this situation, but I think in a lot of other ways about resources that are going to be available for things like cancer control, but also more broadly, public health, health care research," Sittig said.

McNulty decided not to accept the position, despite her love for the work.

"I don't trust the job to last again," McNutly said, "and I personally have kind of come to this point of CDC is not off the table for life for me, but it is off the table for the next four years."

Watching the moving Contagion had started her dreams of working in public health at the CDC, which the pandemic cemented, but she compared the demise of her dream job to a bad romance.

"The way I'm kind of thinking about this is that this has been such an abusive relationship in the sense of like, we got let go and now this is the job or the abusive partner, like texting us randomly again, asking what we're up to," McNulty said.