CDC employees have received no guidance on what to do if the government shuts down

That’s bad.

Less than nine hours before Congress’s midnight deadline to reach a budget deal, officials who protect the nation’s health say they have received no official guidance on what to do in the event of a government shutdown.

Staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Vox (on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their jobs) that they’ve heard nothing about what specific protocols to follow if the government has to close, or even whether they’re considered “essential” employees.

Instead, the acting secretary of Health and Human Services sent out an email, just before 3 pm today, saying the agency was “working to update our contingency plans.”

One CDC staffer, who worked at the agency during the last government shutdown in 2013, expressed “alarmed as a taxpayer that there’s been no official guidance, or a set of protocols in place.”

In 2013, for example, emails with information about the worker’s status as a furloughed employee started to come in on September 26, five days before the government shut down on October 1.

“The fact we’re getting no guidance is symptomatic of the dysfunctionality of this entire [administration],” the staffer said. “Having no guidance 12 hours out on the deadline day — it’s not how you run any kind of an organization.”

Another staffer told Vox, “The lack of official guidance on what to specifically do is ridiculous. We’ve had to ask our managers about what happened last time.”

CDC employees do critical work of protecting public health

Employees of the government’s health agencies do the critical work of preventing and tracking disease outbreaks, running clinical trials, performing research, and overseeing food inspections, as I wrote with Vox’s Brian Resnick.

If there’s a budget impasse, funding would stop flowing to the agencies on January 19 when their annual funding expires. This will mean investigators at NIH can no longer enroll new patients in clinical trials, lab technicians at CDC can’t support states with monitoring flu outbreaks, and food inspectors at FDA will have to stop doing the work of overseeing the safety of the food supply.

According to the government’s 2018 contingency plan for a government shutdown, 50 percent of staff across Health and Human Services agencies would be furloughed. The retention rates at specific agencies vary, but the plan suggests only 37 percent of the CDC’s 13,600 employees would be retained. At the two other key health agencies in the department, the NIH and FDA, the numbers are only 23 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

Right now, at CDC at least, the employees who talked to Vox weren’t sure why there was so little official word so far, and wondered whether it was another example of Trump-era governance.

“When I see the lack of organization and procedural norms, it makes me question what’s going on,” one said, “why isn’t this happening? Is this a directive? Did they not know?”

How’s prep for a government shutdown going at CDC, NIH, FDA? Reach Julia at julia.belluz@vox.com, on KeyBase at jbelluz, or through PGP: F65A 5539 A081 B01E 1E8D 498D 6489 E570 AEAB E972