The Ron Show2 Apr 2025

RIF'd CDC asset: "Feels like I've died but I'm also very much alive."

Jason Cecil - like all of us - is defined by more than just a job; he's a husband, Dekalb County Ethics Board alternate, President of the LGBTQ+ recovery community-serving GALANO Club, to name a few of his attribuets.

His job at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) was really important, too, though. Until yesterday, he had been a Public Health Analyst in Global Immunizations since 2003, focusing on polio eradication, measles elimination, and immunization systems strengthening, before a promotion to the CDC division on Global HIV and TB. To hear him tell it, his was the division hit hardest by yesterday's cuts.

Remember the DOGE-Elon Musk-Karen Leavitt-Donald Trump lie about $50 million for condoms "to Hamas?" Well, Mozambique in Africa has a Gaza province and none of those intellectual heavyweights distinguished between the two and even the monetary figure (and condoms, altogether) were overblown. It's the division Jason had been working in - global HIV and TB - that all along was " major, multi-pronged effort to address HIV and tuberculosis — not a dump of condoms."

Well, Jason's no longer working in a capacity to deliver results for the George W. Bush-launched PEPFAR: the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. It was on World AIDS Day in 2022 that Bush returned to Washington (a rarity) to tout the two decades of PEPFAR's accomplishments. Yes, that Bush.

Anyhow, Jason was kind enough to join me today to share his RIF experience, reaction, emotions and insights into what being a federal employee in such a necessary agency has been like since Trump was re-elected last November.

Were contingency plans being made? Any "offloading" or "lifeboating" of research and data? What was the mood in the hallways like? What's next for career civil servants like him?

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