Wide-ranging layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have decimated staff responsible for gun violence research and prevention, raising alarm among public health experts that hard-won progress is being dismantled.
The cuts began April 1, after Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Department of Health and Human Services — which includes the CDC — would eliminate more than 10,000 jobs and close several divisions. It’s the latest downsizing at the nation’s health agencies since President Donald Trump took office and gave Elon Musk a mandate to slash the federal government.
The CDC’s Injury Center and its Division of Violence Prevention — a unit that studies and works to prevent gun deaths and injuries — were among the dozens of teams that lost personnel.
The division’s former director, James Mercy, who retired in 2023, estimated that the unit lost about three-quarters of its staff, though an official count isn’t available. In all, the CDC laid off more than 2,400 employees, according to HHS.
The downsizing has also hit the data systems used to track gun violence and craft more effective policies to address it.
The CDC division that runs WISQARS — a database that includes gun deaths and injuries — was decimated except for a suicide prevention unit. Mother Jones reported that at least 40 people in the division received termination notices.
Mercy and other experts warned that the losses could undermine the federal government’s already limited ability to combat gun violence.
“By eliminating the programmatic staff, you’ve eliminated CDC’s ability to take knowledge, apply it, and help communities use it to make a difference,” Mercy said.
The CDC declined to comment and HHS did not respond to requests for comment. The CDC’s media relations team and the office responsible for handling Freedom of Information Act requests were also gutted, according to independent journalist Marisa Kabas, who has compiled a running list of CDC and NIH units affected by cuts.
Experts said the layoffs could cripple the administration of federal gun violence research funding, which resumed in 2019 only after Congress ended a decades-long freeze. Since 2019, the Injury Center has managed half of the research funding — $12.5 million annually — provided by Congress.
Congress has directed another $12.5 million each year to the National Institutes of Health. But layoffs at some of the NIH units managing those grants have put the future of that funding in doubt, as well.
Linda Degutis, a former director of the Injury Center, said the research grant process is complex and the cuts would make it “next to impossible” for the center to continue overseeing it.
Researchers expressed doubts that the funding will survive.
“I’m appalled that Congress’s power of the purse seems to be taken away from them, and they don’t seem to do anything,” said David Hemenway, a longtime injury prevention researcher at Harvard University.
Researchers are also worried that the layoffs will endanger CDC WONDER, a database used widely by researchers, public health officials, and journalists to study firearm deaths. Researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for example, used WONDER data to determine that firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children.
By eliminating the programmatic staff, you’ve eliminated CDC’s ability to take knowledge, apply it, and help communities use it to make a difference
James Mercy, former director of the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention
The team that oversees the National Violent Death Reporting System, or NVDRS, appears to have escaped this round of cuts, Mercy said. NVDRS provides data that researchers say is crucial for understanding how violent deaths happen and evaluating efforts to prevent them. Drawn from years of state coroner, law enforcement, and death records, the database partially feeds WISQARS but is so detailed that direct access to it is mostly off-limits to anyone outside academic circles.
“Data systems are crucial,” said Hemenway, who leads Harvard’s Injury Control Research Center. “If they screw up all the data systems, you can’t trust anything. That would be the worst — like saying science and social science don’t matter at all.”
Experts warned that undermining the CDC’s data systems is akin to flying blind, hindering efforts to identify problems and measure the effectiveness of policies.
“That’s why all this data is collected and why the research is undertaken: to influence the programmatic efforts that can really make a difference in communities,” Mercy said. “That whole part of the work has been eliminated.”
The timing is particularly devastating, the experts said, coming just as the field of gun violence prevention research was experiencing a resurgence.
“These cuts and the potential cuts to the funding supporting this work — it’s going to drive people away,” Mercy said.
The cuts could ripple down to state injury prevention programs, which receive CDC funding and often address gun violence. Experts said that even if funds continue to flow to states, the loss of CDC oversight and expertise would make those programs less effective.
Hemenway said the current situation may be worse than the funding restrictions imposed in the 1990s, when Congress effectively banned federal funding for gun violence research for two decades. “Compared to this, that’s peanuts,” he said.
Hemenway expects the cuts to reverberate for years. “If adults come back to run the government in four years, all this institutional memory will be lost,” Hemenway said. “It’s going to take more than four years to get us back to where we were just two months ago.”
