The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are frantically trying to bring in hundreds of workers fired in a mass Trump administration purge back into work, reported The Associated Press on Wednesday.
"A message seen by the AP was sent with the subject line, 'Read this e-mail immediately,'" reported Mike Stobbe. "It said that 'after further review and consideration,' a Feb. 15 termination notice has been rescinded and the employee was cleared to return to work on Wednesday. 'You should return to duty under your previous work schedule,' it said. 'We apologize for any disruption that this may have caused.'"
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Altogether, around 180 people who were terminated from the CDC under the original order were told to report back to work.
"It’s not clear how many of the reinstated employees returned to work Wednesday. And it’s also unclear whether the employees would be spared from widespread job cuts that are expected soon across government agencies," said the report.
However, this marks only the latest in a series of similar missteps made as Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk try to downsize the federal government, only to realize some of the dismissed workers were critical. The federal government was also forced to frantically rehire terminated workers from the National Nuclear Safety Administration, as well as bird flu experts laid off from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the middle of an outbreak that, in addition to posing the risk of a deadly human pandemic, is causing a critical egg shortage.
Other workers who were fired and then rehired, according to the report, including Food and Drug Administration officials in charge of overseeing food safety and medical devices, and employees with the National Park Service, which saw chaos after the Trump administration inadvertently fired the locksmith in charge of rescuing Yosemite visitors from bathrooms.
This pattern is not unique to the federal government, either. Musk reportedly found himself in a similar situation after he first took control of the Twitter social media platform, since renamed to X, and fired 3,700 people, some of whom the company later tried to rehire back.
