Surpise, surprise: 80% of CDC workers are still working from home

Most employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are still working from home.

The federal health agency, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, said 80 percent of staff were still partially or fully working from home.

Dr Stephen Cochi, who worked at the CDC for four decades before retiring this year, warned remote work was making it ‘almost impossible to get anything done’.

It comes as the agency lays off 3,000 scientists, comms experts and nurses that were recruited to help fight Covid.

The CDC first moved to remote working in March 2020 to reduce social contacts and limit the spread of Covid.

In August this year, the agency reduced its quarantine advice for Covid cases from 10 to five days, saying the shorter time would help keep more people in offices.

Yet four months later, the CDC has yet to roll back its own teleworking plans.

In response to an FOIA request submitted by Kaiser Health News, the CDC said 10,020 of its 12,892 employees were still allowed ‘hybrid’ or ‘totally remote’ work.

Some 6,237 — or half the workforce — are able to work entirely remotely.

The CDC has refused to drop its working from home policies even as Covid becomes a largely backdrop issue in American life.

Employee guidance published by the agency in April says teleworking has given employees ‘flexibility’.

It adds that the move has also allowed them to employ staff outside its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

The agency’s director Dr Rochelle Walensky has also previously championed remote working.

She said in September: ‘People at the CDC are working well, they’re working hard, and they don’t necessarily need to be on-site in Atlanta.

‘In fact, oftentimes, they’re more productive off-site.’ 

She made the comments in response to a question from Louisiana’s GOP Senator Bill Cassidy, who asked in September how she expected to set an example if she was never in the office.

Dr Walensky ‘splits her time’ between Atlanta, Washington DC, local health departments and the 60 other countries where the CDC operates.

Dr Cochi told KHN the agency used to be sleek and able to respond quickly to crises, but complained it was now bogged down by a remote workforce and ballooning bureaucracy.

‘I would like to see every effort made to try to restore that culture to the extent possible, because CDC will potentially lose some of its excellence if it can’t,’ he said.

Dr Pamela Hinds, a management scientist at Stanford University, added: ‘One of the things that a really strong new leader would do is they’d be visible, they’d be walking the halls, they’d have the door open.

‘That’s much harder to accomplish when nobody’s there.’

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now reported to be mostly back to the office.

But other government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are still said to have many employees working remotely. It only unveiled a hybrid back-to-office policy last month.

A CDC spokesman said: ‘The role of CDC director has historically involved a significant amount of official travel around the globe; requiring the director to be mobile and able to work from anywhere.’

They reiterated that the director works between the agency’s headquarters, the nation’s capital and other sites within the US and abroad.