Facing a furor after news reports last week that the prestigious corps of young epidemiologists being trained as “disease detectives” at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been targeted for termination, the administration of President Donald Trump reversed course. The roughly 100 trainees at the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) were spared.
But another outstanding group of young CDC trainees wasn’t so lucky. At least 15 of 21 fellows in CDC’s lesser known Laboratory Leadership Service (LLS) were axed last weekend. The ultracompetitive, 2-year program, which trains Ph.D. scientists in the intricacies of public health laboratory work, has spawned leaders at state and local labs from Milwaukee to Tennessee to New York City.
“The LLS fellowship is the best of the best. It is the most elite fellowship in the country for training public health scientists,” says one LLS fellow who received a termination notice.
She had been working to produce high-quality wastewater treatment tests for city and state public health departments to monitor the spread of COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus, mpox, and H5 influenza. LLS “was a bridge for me from my Ph.D. to work in public health in a lab capacity, which is what I want to do: to serve as a public servant,” the scientist says.
“It makes very little sense” to gut the LLS program, says David Payne, an LLS alum who directs the City of Milwaukee Health Department’s Public Health Laboratory and whose lab hosted a fellow who was just terminated. “It is just a tremendous disappointment … to see that this program that is training the next generation of laboratory leaders is being cut off.”
Neither CDC nor its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), responded to emailed questions about the terminations.
HHS sent the fired fellows letters last weekend stating: “You are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs and your performance has not been adequate.” But HHS was in no position to judge fellows’ abilities because LLS performance reviews are not logged in the CDC system, several fellows and former fellows told Science.
One fired fellow provided Science with a 10 February letter from the LLS program stating he “provided invaluable service to CDC and the public health laboratory community” and that he “excels as an LLS fellow and is an asset to public health.”
Launched in 2015, the LLS program was meant to draw top talent to CDC after a series of agency lapses, including the transfer of live anthrax samples to improperly equipped CDC labs and the transfer of Ebola virus samples from a top-level biosafety lab to a lower level one.
LLS fellows often accompany their better known colleagues in EIS when states or localities ask for help with local outbreaks. One LLS fellow built a field lab in Nebraska to help state public health workers handle a rabies outbreak in 2023. Others helped rebuild public health labs in the U.S. Virgin Islands after they were slammed by hurricanes in 2017. “Even public health heroes have to pack,” CDC boasted in a November 2024 Instagram video showing a fellow—who has now been fired—packing to respond to a dengue outbreak in Puerto Rico.
Fellows also work in labs at CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. One alum, David Lowe, genetically tweaked the rabies virus to make lab mice “glow” under a special imager when infected with it. The idea was to allow shorter experiments using fewer animals as scientists work to improve vaccines and medicines.
Another fellow called his firing “a punch in the gut.” In January, he and another LLS fellow were deployed to Florida, where public health scientists had asked CDC for help adapting a blood test to detect the Oropouche virus in patients with unexplained fever. An arthropod-borne virus that occasionally causes serious brain complications, Oropouche has surged in Latin America, and Florida public health responders saw at least 90 cases last year in travelers returning from affected countries. They were hoping to have the test ready for this summer.
But by the time the LLS fellows returned from their 2-week assignment, the Trump ban on external communications by HHS agencies stopped them from transmitting their advice and action plan to the state of Florida. Now that they’re fired, they will be unable to help state scientists deploy the test, even if the communications ban is lifted.
“These fellows really are the future of public health,” says one CDC staffer who works with the LLS program. “And when you fire them, it’s not the fellows, but the [young] people who are looking into working in public health. They see that they just terminated all these very successful, service- minded people. Who would want to come in and work in public health after this?”