The picketers who gathered along Clifton Road in Atlanta on Tuesday, just outside the guarded gates of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had chosen familiar ground for protesters furious over issues ranging from animal research to vaccines.
But Tuesday’s demonstration was unusual: Hundreds of people had gathered to champion the jobs of public health workers, days after the C.D.C. began cutting about 10 percent of its work force.
Outside of the Washington, D.C., area, few places are at higher risk from the Trump administration’s budgetary ax than Atlanta’s concentrated medical corridor, east of downtown, where the C.D.C., Emory University and its scientific research empire, and a large Veterans Affairs hospital practically bump up against each other. Billions of dollars flow through the campuses each year, helping to employ thousands of people.
But at risk is more than jobs and dollars. It is stature. A city that has long prided itself on business acumen and a sacred role in the civil rights movement has also cherished the status conferred on it by its centrality to public health and medical science.
“Atlanta really has seen itself as a global health capital of the world — at worst, one of several global health capitals,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a former C.D.C. official who was the president of the Atlanta-based nonprofit Task Force for Global Health.
Now, the potential weakening of the nation’s public health system threatens to hollow out Atlanta’s influence. And for a place like Atlanta, where it is common to see someone with C.D.C. ties in the preschool pickup line, at church or at the hair salon, the cuts are tearing at a generations-long bastion of shared prestige.
“It made us feel like we were a part of a big picture,” Todd Ginsberg, an owner of The General Muir deli, mused of the C.D.C. employees and visitors who have flocked to Clifton Road (and his restaurant). “Having something like the C.D.C. that’s known throughout the world, yeah, it’s a big deal to have it right across the street from us, and it’s a great source of pride.”
On Thursday night, during a raucous town hall meeting in the well-to-do suburb of Roswell, about 20 miles north of the C.D.C., Representative Rich McCormick, a Republican, backed the White House. During a session where his constituents hooted and booed, he twice suggested that fired C.D.C. employees were doing work “duplicitous” of artificial intelligence. The scene echoed the early “tea party” town halls of 2009 and health care town halls of 2017 that foreshadowed the rebukes that voters would hand the presidents’ parties the following year.
“I know how they do their research,” Mr. McCormick, who is also a doctor, said of the C.D.C. He added, “I believe that they could do more with less, just like the Marine Corps and everybody else does when you have to do more with less in order to survive.”
One town hall attendee retorted: “Trying to do more with less, that’s reasonable. What’s not reasonable is taking this chain-saw approach.”
Public health experts have warned that draconian reductions at the C.D.C. could have widespread repercussions in the United States and elsewhere. Still, with the White House on a seemingly indiscriminate crusade to cut federal spending and C.D.C. skeptics now in the top ranks of government, many officials are bracing for the possibility of more dismissals, as well as zeroed-out budgets and cratered morale that could send more people toward the exits.
Separately, Emory leaders said in a message to employees this month that one part of the effort to curb federal spending could amount to an annual hit of $140 million that “could affect nearly every academic unit at Emory, with both immediate and long-term consequences for our scientific research, clinical trials, patient care and other academic pursuits.” Emory’s prominent medical school could be affected, as could its renowned National Primate Research Center.
Through a spokesman, the university’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, declined an interview request but said in a public letter on Feb. 11 that there would “likely be more funding adjustments at the federal level in the weeks and months ahead.”
The C.D.C. opened in 1946, when it was called the Communicable Disease Center, as a part of a government effort to combat malaria. The agency was based in Atlanta because the mosquito-ridden Southeast was a hot spot for the parasitic disease. The next year, the C.D.C. paid Emory $10, or about $148 today, for 15 acres to house its headquarters, and as the decades progressed, both grew into biomedical behemoths with global, often parallel, clout.
In 2014, for example, C.D.C. officials were deeply involved in combating the Ebola outbreak in Africa. After American aid workers contracted the virus, they were flown from Liberia to Georgia and whisked by ambulance down Clifton Road, past the C.D.C.’s offices and into a specialized Emory ward.
During an address at a local Rotary Club meeting last year, Dr. Mandy Cohen, then the C.D.C.’s director, noted that she led the only major federal agency based outside of Washington, Maryland or Virginia. More than 10,000 C.D.C. employees, she said, were in the Atlanta area.
“If you turned our budget and our economic footprint into a publicly traded company, we’d be in the Top 5 of the companies here in Atlanta,” Dr. Cohen added — no small claim in an area that boasts the homes of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and UPS.
“It’s one of our crown jewels,” Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said in an interview on Thursday. “Everyone knows that we host the world’s pre-eminent public health organization and the world’s top epidemiologists who protect our country and the world.”
For the C.D.C., especially, political skirmishes have come and gone throughout its history. To current and former officials, though, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, the emerging confrontations with the Trump administration feel far sharper, in part because there is so little clarity about how they will unfold.
Mr. Trump clashed with C.D.C. officials during the Covid-19 pandemic in his first term, and the ill will from the far right has only festered since then. Employees today spoke of fear, confusion and a lack of communication from leaders about their future.
Neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the C.D.C. responded to requests for comment.
Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, has so far displayed little public alarm about the changes at one of Georgia’s premier employers.
“I know they have some layoffs at the C.D.C. and other things, but, you know, government can stand a little right-sizing,” Mr. Kemp said at a Politico event in Munich last weekend, when he pointed toward the state government’s record of streamlining its operations.
Mr. Ossoff, who is up for re-election next year and may face a challenge from Mr. Kemp, said it was “deeply foolish, self-defeating and dangerous” to undermine the C.D.C.
“How can the governor of Georgia fail to defend one of Georgia’s crown jewels, an essential public health asset for the whole country, and the extraordinary people who work there?” Mr. Ossoff asked.
Other defenders of the C.D.C. argued that the cost to Atlanta would be greater than any financial savings since the agency, they believe, is as much a reputational and academic force as an economic one.
The C.D.C. “helps make Atlanta the city that it is,” said Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, an Atlanta native who was the founding president of the Morehouse School of Medicine and the health secretary during the George H.W. Bush administration. “It adds a quality to the city that differentiates it from any other city in the country.”
Mr. Ginsberg said he and his partners had chosen their restaurant’s location partly because C.D.C. and Emory workers “had traveled and experienced a lot of the culture we were trying to bring to Atlanta.” He fondly recalled how C.D.C. employees fortified his restaurant in the early days of the pandemic by stocking up on gift cards. Now, he said he was already losing some business as agency officials canceled events.
“I can’t imagine anyone in government or wherever it may be wanting to get rid of that agency,” he said, adding, “I’m hopefully optimistic that the C.D.C. will remain exactly where it is.”
Current and former C.D.C. employees harbor the same hopes. But veterans like Dr. Rosenberg, who attributes his 1999 departure from the C.D.C. to a battle with Republicans over the politics of public health, fear that this era’s cuts will accelerate an exodus of talent from Atlanta, draining the region of intellectual firepower and international influence.
He is particularly worried about whether the agency, and the city, will be able to attract the next generation of scientists.
“Someone on the outside who has job possibilities that pay much more than public health,” he said sadly, “I can’t imagine why they would come to C.D.C.”
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