The shambles called CDC

There are 163 days left in the Bush administration and we can hope that there are that number -- or less -- left in the Gerberding era at CDC. Julie Gerberding is the CDC Director and her abrasive, brutal and incompetent management style have taken the agency that was the jewel in the crown of federal public health and made it into a second rate, muscle-bound bureaucracy. The CDC-Gerberding slide has been going on for a long time and we have talked about it often here, almost from the start of this blog in 2004. Even though she is presumably in the final months of her tenure (she's a political appointment, appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services), she is still "re-organizing" the agency. The latest version may be the most emblematic of her "leadership":

The director's office staff grew by more than 40 percent during Gerberding's controversial agency-wide reorganization, begun in 2003, called the Futures Initiative. Before the reorganization, the office had about 1,200 employees. It now has about 1,700, Skinner said.

While the staff reduction incentives are being offered to positions that include certain administrators, accountants and lawyers, some medical officer and public health adviser positions also are eligible.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warned in a report last month that the CDC will face challenges replacing retiring medical officers and other similar positions due to a national shortage of public health professionals. More than one-quarter of the CDC's workers are eligible to retire in the next five years, the GAO said. (Alison Young, Atlanta Journal Constitution)

Here's the official "All Hands" announcement to CDC staff (for your reading pleasure):

As part of CDC's Strategic Management of Human Capital Plan, CDC leadership is committed to providing strategic leadership direction, guidance, and services as efficiently as possible. To help achieve this goal, CDC has been authorized Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments (VSIP), known as "early out and buyout", for up to 106 employees in the Office of the Director (OD) so that resulting vacancies can be realigned most effectively in accomplishing CDC's mission

This is followed by details on who is eligible, payouts, etc. You can read it over at the unofficial CDC Chatter site, "A Blog to Discuss Issues at CDC." But it's the back and forth chatter at the site that's interesting. There is no agreement among the anonymous commenters on why this is happening and whether it's a good thing or not. But there seems to be agreement that this won't fix what is wrong with CDC. Here's a sampling (from the comments thread of EARLY OUT AND BUYOUT ANNOUNCED FOR CDC, OD? [OD is Office of the Director]):

On the language of the memo:

Over the past few years we have suffered the introduction of a dense, uninterpretable, vaguely business-inspired patina of verbal opacity into CDC. Leadership pronouncements are sent forth into the world draped in a fine mist of pseudo-managerial babble, like a statue of a bloated, decrepit Roman emperor whose pudgy marble loins are covered with the foliage of a vine or some strategically (or is it tactically?) positioned bit of flowing cloth.

Take, for example, "As part of CDC's Strategic Management of Human Capital Plan, CDC leadership is committed to providing strategic leadership direction, guidance, and services..." Do they mean, "we're meant to be lean and efficient, but we've grown bloated and unwieldy, so we'll shed some fat." Who knows?

Rational thinking is expressed in concise, logical, sinewy prose. Flabby, jargon-ridden vaporizings that randomly employ the terms "strategic," "management," "capital," "leadership," "guidance," as substitute for linear thought process is either a reflection of atrophied thought or of disregard for rationality.

No scientist who learned his craft at CDC would embarrass himself or the institution with such writing.

On motive:

Why does this only apply to the OD? This sound like a payoff for all the Dr. G loyalists before they leave or are removed with her departure in the coming months. Maybe it is designed to keep them from testifying or writing tell-all books about 7 years of chaos and corruption?

Reply to this:

A buyout doesn't give you a "get out testifying" card or stop you from writing a book, even if that was the case.

To me, it looks like Dr G has finally heard the music, and is cutting the size of her bloated staff - just as members of Congress have suggested for some time. The message from the Hill might have been, "reduce your staff, or we'll reduce it for you". And this time, it was going to stick.

If the goal is to cut 106 positions from OD/OD, the most efficient way to do that is to retire or separate them directly from OD/OD - particularly if many of the staff are in the retirement zone anyway. Send 106 OD/OD staff home for good, and you're done. If it had been offered CDC-wide, then those 106 positions would come from all over CDC, and you still need to move 106 people out of OD/OD. So now, you've sent 106 people home, AND you have to find new jobs for 106 other people; that means you've disrupted 212 senior positions (maybe less, if you drop a few of the OD/OD people into the vacancies).

I wouldn't spend time hallucinating about conspiracy theories. I'd be disgusted by the fact that OD/OD can absorb 106 departures - how friggin bloated is it? That's the size of an entire division - pffft, gone.

And if 106 was a negotiated number, how many did Congress want? 200?

Response to point that this has been planned for some time:

"Gerberding actually said months ago that she was going to ask for this as part of a reorganization of the OD that she had planned."

Didn't she build the staff to its present, inflated size? Either way, she's had years to reorganize without conducting a buyout of over 100 positions; just attrition alone would have got her 75 positions over the years.

It's an "embarrassment of riches" no matter how or why it's happening, and when you're talking about FTEs - holy cripes, Batman. That's way over $5MIL in salaries alone.

On a comment that this won't be attractive to the many business types Gerberding brought in to the agency without any public health experience or dedication to its mission:

I believe you are absolutely correct. We have been saddled for a long time to come with a cohort whose members gained their high GSs by generating endless volumes of drivel toxically laced with the verbal talismans of "strategic," "tactic," "leadership," "goals," "innovations," "synergies," "marketing," "messaging," and all the other offspring of cross-breeding MBA-speak with Public Relations jargon.

Oh for the days when those at the top were respected for leading the institution in controling diseases and advancing the science of public health.

Another:

Unfortunately, some former decent scientists and program folks have also drunk the Kool Aid and are using their considerable brainpower to disseminate said drivel. From Epi Aid to Kool Aid, too sad.

Another:

How oh so true all of this is. It certainly will be interesting who finally leaves. I guess we should hold our breaths too, as they may come back as a contractor. Oh my!

Had enough? If not, you can see more of how the sausage is made at CDC Chatter. Check out the thread on NCPHI Reorganization (NCPHI is the National Center for Public Health Informatics; it is within CDC).

This is a broken agency and its Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, a Bush administration appointee, is the one most responsible for breaking it. The country and the world has lost a resource. More to lay at the doorstep of the unbelievably and permanently incompetent Bush administration.

163 days. They can still do a lot of damage. Keep your fingers crossed they won't.