Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees returning to the office more than a week after a gunman shot about 500 bullets at the Atlanta headquarters are finding remnants of a crime scene.
A CDC employee sent NOTUS photographs of windows still pockmarked with bullet holes on Monday afternoon. Handwritten signs taped to chairs warned employees to avoid glass on the carpet.
“I was thinking they would have at least enhanced security going into campus and/or in buildings, but it seems oddly the same as usual,” the CDC employee told NOTUS via text.
A CDC spokesperson said in an email to NOTUS that the agency is “working closely with [the Georgia Bureau of Investigation] on a security assessment of the facilities to ensure the safety, security and wellbeing of staff for when they return to campus.”
On Aug. 8, a gunman shot hundreds of bullets at the CDC, killing a police officer before dying by suicide after the attack. The shooter, Patrick White, 30, reportedly believed the COVID-19 vaccine had given him depression and had written about wanting to make “the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine,” GBI Director Chris Hosey told PBS.
As of this week, President Donald Trump had not mentioned the shooting. In the days following the shooting, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was lambasted by federal employees for his slow response and for not acknowledging that the shooter was motivated by misinformation about vaccines.
In an email to CDC staff that was reviewed by NOTUS, Kennedy wrote that the shooting was a “reminder of the very human challenges public servants sometimes face.”
The majority of CDC employees worked remotely last week, the staff member told NOTUS — though it was difficult for many to complete their work because people stopped taking their laptops home with them at the end of the day after the return-to-office mandate. Morale, this person felt, was low.
“During my 15 years working at CDC, there have been major ice storms and hurricanes and even the pandemic, and none of those things deterred many CDC employees from getting on campus or doing what they had to do to keep operations moving,” they explained. “Only now, there’s a much different feel resonating. As if we have just been beat down so much that we’ve lost motivation to go above and beyond for our work and for our country.”
They hypothesized that last week’s pause in the CDC’s publication of measles data and a canceled call for clinicians about an outbreak were due to the shooting.
The CDC spokesperson said that the call was postponed and will be rescheduled. They didn’t specify why it was postponed.
The agency in charge of protecting the country from health threats has been targeted by the Trump administration for cuts. Nearly a quarter of its workforce has either been let go or taken voluntary buyouts since January, and the reconciliation law reduced funding for programs like HIV prevention initiatives. Some divisions, like the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, would be eliminated completely in the ongoing HHS reorganization proposed by Kennedy.
The secretary also has a history of inflammatory statements about the CDC. He compared it to “Nazi death camps” in 2013 when falsely linking vaccines to rising autism rates in children and harshly criticized its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I will clean up the cesspool of corruption at CDC and force the public health agencies to come clean about Covid vaccines. I’ll hold responsible those who lied or concealed critical health information,” Kennedy wrote on X in 2024 while running for president.
One Food and Drug Administration employee told NOTUS that they felt the shooting at the CDC marked an escalation in violence related to public health since it targeted research scientists, not regulators or healthcare workers.
“I think CDC was seeing themselves as more remote from these threats and were surprised because CDC is really a wonky agency,” they said. “At FDA, we have always been aware of it — our work touches too many lives directly.”
Both the FDA employee and a National Institutes of Health employee told NOTUS that they have not noticed any increased security procedures since the shooting. Neither agency responded to questions about whether security has increased.
Kennedy toured CDC’s campus last week, along with the agency’s newly confirmed director, Susan Monarez, and Health and Human Services Deputy Director Jim O’Neill. During a call last week with CDC staff, Monarez, a career federal scientist, reportedly said “misinformation can be dangerous” and that rebuilding public trust would require “rational, evidence-based discourse.”
The CDC employee who spoke to NOTUS said the Trump administration has painted federal workers as entitled and lazy.
“I don’t think they (DOGE, or whoever) see us as resilient as we are and how much abuse we can take and still try to do our jobs,” they said.
They also said they were worried about the slowness of the response to the shooting. They found out about it from a family member who was in the area before either an email or a text alert went out to CDC staff.
“I have listened to accounts of colleagues over the past few days, all housed in different buildings. None of them were even aware of the shooting until friends and family members contacted them,” the employee said. “Some people heard the gunshots but thought it might be construction. Others went to the windows as a reflex to see what the noise was.”
The shooting began just before 5 p.m., CBS News reported. The employee said they received an email alert a little after 5 p.m. and a text alert around 9 p.m.
“This is the part that is most troubling, that many people were unaware of what was going on and were basically sitting ducks in the whole situation,” they said.
While returning to CDC campus is still optional, the employee said they and others have chosen to return because their lab work can only be done in person.
“We trudge on because we believe in what we do, and we feel a sense of responsibility to the American people, and for some of us, to those beyond the U.S.,” they said.