We continue our series of 📢 Voices From the Field with an entry from the former Chief Operating Officer at CDC.
One year after leaving CDC, former Chief Operating Officer Dr. Debra Lubar reflects on grief, institutional instability, and the people behind the public health systems that so many of us assumed would always endure. She argues that rebuilding public health must go beyond organizational reform: it will require restoring trust, protecting the workforce, and remembering the human relationships that makes our the work possible.
If you’d like to follow Dr. Lubar’s lead and share your own perspective on these complicated times for public health, I’d love to hear from you.
Like all the articles in The Public Health Workforce is Not OK newsletter, this is not intended to be a monologue. This newsletter welcomes discussion, dialogue, disagreement, and amplification.
Please comment, like, share, recommend, subscribe, or get in touch!
By Dr. Debra Lubar
One year ago in April, I walked off CDC’s campus for the last time, after spending over 20 years in the agency. I did go back once, to get an encrypted drive of the electronic files that I was permitted to bring with me. The IT security technician met me at the Visitors’ Center entrance, so I wouldn’t have sign in as a guest.
A few weeks ago, I met a long-time colleague for coffee at General Muir, the deli across the street from CDC’s main campus. I’ve had hundreds of meals there, including the Shabbat dinner before my son’s bar mitzvah the week it opened. I hadn’t driven that route in months, and I remembered how beautiful my ride to work through Druid Hills in full bloom had been every spring, even last spring. Maybe it was the most beautiful thing about April 2025.
That April Fool’s Day, reduction-in-force notices were issued to over 2,000 CDC employees….
This article was originally written for the Milbank Memorial Fund’s blog On Balance: Policies for Health.
✨Starting in honour of MLK Day, all newsletter authors are invited to share action steps. We compile all suggestions into the Resistance Action page that we have been building since we started. ✨
If you would like to support the public health workforce, including federal workers and former feds, consider taking the following steps:
Share a note of thanks with public health heroes across the nation to recognise their work and commitment.
Get involved in collective advocacy and activism to defend and advance the scientific ecosystem of the United States by supporting Stand Up for Science.
Support NIH staff and alums through the 27 UNIHted network.
Support former CDC colleagues through the CDC Mutual Aid Network.
Stay informed using resources for former and current federal workers from the Partnership for Public Service
Invest in the next generation of public health professionals by participating in APHA Mentor Match as a mentor or mentee.
Advocate to your legislators for a strong public health workforce, including reinstating RIFed positions, lifting hiring freezes, protecting the training pipeline, and restoring the authority and independence that agencies need to do their work. Using this tool connects you straight to your legislators.
Call for sustained investment in health and science by urging elected officials to prioritize public health, research, and prevention.
Vote for leaders who support public health and demonstrate respect for science, evidence, and bipartisan solutions.
Challenge misinformation about federal workers by speaking up when harmful or inaccurate narratives arise and reinforcing the value of public service. Name the reality that federal public health workers are highly skilled, mission-driven professionals who chose public service to improve lives and consistently deliver work that benefits the public.
Debra Lubar, PhD, is President of the Milbank Memorial Fund and former Chief Operating Officer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she led operations, policy strategy, and budget planning for the agency across multiple presidential administrations. Over more than two decades in federal public health leadership, she helped guide CDC responses to COVID-19, Ebola, Zika, chronic disease prevention, and emerging infectious diseases, and is a recipient of the Presidential Rank Award for distinguished public service.
If you would like to share your perspective on public health right now in this Newsletter written TO and FOR and BY and ABOUT the public health workforce, we are currently running three series:
📢 Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health
Opinion pieces grounded in lived experience💌 Love Letters to Public Health
Poetry, prose, visual art, or other creative formats🚪 Resignation Letters
Real or imagined correspondence documenting what is happening to our people and our institutions in real time
Please get in touch if you would like to submit a draft to any of these series. I will work closely with you to prepare it for publication. Review previous instalments for examples. I will offer you my personal promise of confidentiality if requested.
Lots more information on how to share your story is available here:
I close by emphasising what I said in a previous newsletter:
“At this time of uncertainty for the public health workforce, let’s remember our commitment to science and evidence and data. We know that validating emotions and baggage has a place too, but we need to be able to identify them and distinguish opinion from fact.
Let’s recommit to kindness and mutual support for the public health workforce and beyond. If leaders are trying to sow divisions among us, the best we can do is to respond with empathy, and by strengthening, connecting, and lifting up one another.
Right now, the best I can offer my fellow public health professionals is a place* to gather and reflect and share and vent and organize and ask questions and offer support to one another. We’re going to need that now more than ever.”
*This is a plug for the Public Health Connections Lounge on LinkedIn, where we seek to build community and conversation among public health professionals. Join us.
Public Health Connections Lounge
If you are new around here, Welcome to The Public Health Workforce is Not OK! In this newsletter, I share frank insights and start conversations about the experiences of building a public health career. You can get to know me here and here. Please subscribe, review the action steps and the archive, and join the conversations in the Lounge. I am committed to keeping this newsletter free for job seekers (at least, for as long as I still have a job).
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