She got her dream job at CDC back. But she’s already moving on

Cancer outreach worker Bri McNulty, 23, was one of 750 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was terminated abruptly over email in mid-February, amid a slew of federal workforce dismissals.

On Tuesday, McNulty got an equally surprising email hiring her back. She was one of an unknown number of probationary employees at the CDC to be asked back in a perfunctory email.

McNulty was part of the agency’s elite Public Health Associate Program, assigned to the Iowa Cancer Consortium, a small group working on statewide efforts to combat what is the country’s second-highest cancer rate.

New plans

McNulty says her cohort of Public Health Associates included 66 people. People in the Laboratory Leadership Service program also had their jobs restored, according to NPR’s reporting.

But McNulty has been busy making other plans since that mid-February bombshell dropped by Elon Musk’s government downsizing effort.

She contacted a former employer at Penn State and quickly got a job offer. She’s made arrangements to move out of Iowa City, where she’s been since late 2023. She’s even found a new place to live near the new job.

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

McNulty decided to check her email on the laptop one last time. That’s when she saw the subject line: “Read this email immediately.”

“You should return to duty under your previous work schedule. We apologize for any disruption this may have caused,” the email reads, in part.

Like a bad romance

McNulty says that once again, she wasn’t sure what to make of it all.

“It’s sketchy again because the email is from a contact we don’t have,” she says. It came from EmployeeNotifications@cdc.gov. “And 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 grew up dreaming of working in public health at the CDC. Watching the movie Contagion lit her curiosity, and the pandemic solidified that commitment.

McNulty says that dream job soured suddenly, like 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 says.

No word to her boss

Kelly Wells Sittig 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 says.

Bri McNulty decided not to take back the CDC job. But it’s not for lack of loving it, or the work.

“I don’t trust the job to last again,” she says. “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.”

McNulty says she hopes that those working in public health, like her, will focus on surviving to see better days.

“We can’t focus on progress when they’re trying to dismantle all these agencies and organizations,” McNulty says. “So we need to focus on making sure we don’t lose what we already have. But we can’t think about going forward.”

CDC spokespeople did not respond to requests seeking comment.

Scalpel vs. hatchet

On Thursday, President Trump indicated that Cabinet secretaries would have more control of job cuts going forward.

In a social media post, he wrote: “[N]ow that we have my Cabinet in place, I have instructed the Secretaries and Leadership to work with DOGE on Cost Cutting measures and Staffing. As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.'”

The president echoed what Trump voter and Iowa cancer patient Kathie Evenhouse told NPR last week. “It is hurtful to the good things to cut it off — but I do think that we have to do something,” Evenhouse said. “I think it could have been done with a scalpel instead of a hatchet.”