Over three-quarters of workers at the nation’s largest public health agency are working remotely, even after COVID-19 metrics have plunged following fresh peaks in January, according to data obtained by The Epoch Times.
Of the approximately 12,679 full-time workers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 78 percent are either not working in-person at all, or are only doing so part of the time, the CDC’s records office told The Epoch Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA).
The numbers, which have not previously been made public, show agency workers aren’t heeding President Joe Biden, who called in his State of the Union speech “for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again.”
The CDC’s headquarters are in Atlanta.
“People working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office. We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person,” Biden said at the time.
A CDC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
“It took a FOIA request from The Epoch Times to find out that more than half of the CDC employees are working remotely in some capacity. We don’t know if these are lab techs or people who are in the front office. That’s part of the problem,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, told The Epoch Times via email.
“What we do know is if this is the public health equivalent of war, then we need the federal agency on the frontline to show up in the office, be the example, maximize efficiency, and do everything possible to make sure that COVID does not impact our lives any more than it did. Let’s go CDC, let’s get back to work,” he added.
