On March 30, 2026, a quiet update appeared on the CDC’s website. No press release. No formal announcement. Just a list — more than two dozen types of laboratory testing that had become unavailable. Buried within that list: diagnostic testing for rabies and pox viruses, the viral family that includes mpox and smallpox, two pathogens with the power to cause serious nationwide health emergencies.
For most Americans, this news barely registered. But for public health experts who have spent their careers watching the CDC’s institutional capabilities erode in real time, the announcement was alarming. It wasn’t just a paused test. It was a symbol of something far larger: a federal disease-fighting apparatus that is quietly hollowing out at exactly the wrong time.
This is what is actually happening, why it matters deeply to your safety, and what the hard data tells us about where we go from here.
What the CDC Actually Paused
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention functions, among other things, as the nation’s reference laboratory. When a state or local health department encounters a pathogen it cannot confirm on its own — because testing for certain diseases requires specialized equipment, trained scientists, and biosafety infrastructure that most states simply cannot afford — it sends specimens to the CDC.
That safety net has now developed a serious hole.
According to reporting by the New York Times, the CDC posted a website update on March 30, 2026, confirming that testing for rabies and poxviruses had been temporarily paused. The pause is part of a broader review the agency initiated in late 2024 across more than 500 diagnostic tests it offers to support state and local public health laboratories.
The list of paused tests is broader than most people realize. It includes tests for parasitic worms linked to “snail fever,” the virus responsible for “sloth fever,” Epstein-Barr virus, varicella zoster, and a host of other infectious agents. Some of these tests do have commercial alternatives, but for rare, dangerous, or nationally significant pathogens like rabies and pox viruses, the CDC has historically been the one institution capable of definitive confirmation and nationwide tracking.
Scott Becker, CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told the Associated Press that while the CDC has paused some lab testing before, it is now pausing more kinds of tests than ever before — and the reasons are not entirely transparent. The official government explanation, provided by HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon, was that the pause reflects “a routine review to uphold our commitment to high quality laboratory testing”. Public health experts are skeptical of that framing.
The Staffing Crisis Behind the Pause
The testing suspension does not exist in a vacuum. It is the direct consequence of a staffing collapse that has been unfolding at the CDC for over a year.
Since early 2025, the CDC has lost an estimated 20 to 25 percent of its entire workforce due to layoffs, retirements, resignations, and the non-renewal of temporary contracts. Some accounts, including reporting from NPR, put the figure even higher — estimating the CDC effectively lost a quarter to a third of its workforce by the end of 2025, amounting to thousands of individuals.
The impact on specific laboratories has been catastrophic. According to the National Public Health Coalition, an organization formed by former and current CDC employees, the poxvirus and rabies laboratories have each lost approximately half their staff. The malaria division has been hit even harder. These are not junior-level administrative positions. These are highly trained scientific specialists — virologists, epidemiologists, and clinical experts — whose expertise took years, in many cases decades, to develop.
The trajectory going forward is even more sobering. By July 2026, the rabies team is projected to have exactly one person capable of advising state and local health officials. The pox virus team is expected to have no remaining members at all. One expert. For the entire country. To advise on a virus that is nearly universally fatal once symptoms appear.
The first major wave of these staffing cuts began on April 1, 2025, when approximately 10,000 CDC employees received reduction-in-force notices. That was followed by additional rounds of hiring freezes and voluntary departures spurred by uncertainty and low morale. Programs focused on smoking reduction, dental health, gun violence prevention, radiation incident response, and birth defect surveillance have been eliminated or severely scaled back.
President Trump’s proposed FY 2026 budget would reduce CDC funding by 53 percent compared to FY 2024 levels, eliminating over 100 public health programs and funding lines. If enacted by Congress, that figure would represent the most drastic peacetime reduction in the agency’s history.
Why Rabies Testing Is Not a Minor Issue
There is a common misconception that rabies is a solved problem in the United States. It is not.
Each year, 1.4 million Americans seek medical care for a possible rabies exposure. Of those, 100,000 receive post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), a series of injections that are effective at preventing the disease from developing — but only when administered before symptoms begin. Once symptoms appear, rabies is nearly universally fatal.
The reason American rabies deaths remain low — fewer than ten per year in recent years — is not because the virus is rare in wildlife. It is because the surveillance and testing infrastructure works. Nearly 100,000 animals are tested for rabies annually in the United States, with more than 3,500 testing positive every year. That testing pipeline informs the PEP decisions that save lives. When an animal bites a person and that animal cannot be tested, or when test results are delayed, people die.
That reality is not hypothetical. In 2024, two Americans died from rabies following bat encounters in Minnesota and California. Both individuals were aware of their bat contact. Neither sought timely medical attention, in part because they did not understand the risk. The CDC’s confirmatory testing and national surveillance are what enable public health officials to educate at-risk communities, identify exposure clusters, and coordinate rapid response.
As recently as September 2025, the CDC was actively tracking 14 potential rabies outbreaks across 20 states. Six Americans had died from rabies in the 12 months preceding that report — the highest number in recent years. This is not a disease that has been defeated. It is a disease that is being held in check by a system that is now being deliberately dismantled.
Only two state public health laboratories — in New York and California — currently have the capability to provide confirmatory rabies testing. Every other state depends, in one form or another, on the CDC. The question public health officials are now asking is not whether a gap exists. It is how large that gap will become.
The Pox Virus Problem Is Equally Serious
Rabies is frightening, but the pausing of pox virus testing carries its own distinct set of dangers — particularly in the context of mpox.
The United States experienced its first major mpox outbreak in 2022, a crisis that spread to dozens of countries and infected tens of thousands of Americans before being brought under control. By 2025, hundreds of new mpox cases were being reported domestically, including more than a dozen cases of Clade I mpox — a more severe and transmissible strain. The emergence of Clade I in the United States represents a significant escalation of the threat.
The CDC’s role in pox virus testing goes beyond simple diagnosis. The agency provides confirmatory testing, strain identification, and national surveillance data that allow state health officials to understand what variant is circulating, how quickly it is spreading, and who is most at risk. With the poxvirus team expected to be entirely gone by July 2026, that institutional knowledge disappears with the people who hold it.
Many state labs can perform preliminary pox virus screening, but CDC confirmation is what closes the diagnostic loop. Dr. Leonard Peruski, director of New York’s Wadsworth Center, put the risk plainly: the issue is not just about testing capacity, it is about the actionable intelligence that comes from coordinated national surveillance. “If something serious occurs in another state, will the rest of the country be informed promptly enough to make a difference?” he asked.
That question does not have a reassuring answer right now.
What “Temporary” Really Means in This Context
The word “temporary” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the government’s official communications. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon stated the agency anticipates that “some of these tests will be available through CDC labs again in the coming weeks”. But experts who understand the mechanics of federal laboratory programs are far less optimistic.
Scientific testing infrastructure is not a light switch. You cannot rebuild institutional expertise, biosafety protocols, validated testing methodologies, and specialized equipment chains overnight. The scientists who ran these programs were not simply following a manual — they were the manual. Their combined decades of specialized expertise in rabies virology or orthopoxvirus diagnostics represent an irreplaceable form of institutional knowledge that does not exist in commercial laboratories.
Dr. Debra Houry, a former CDC official, warned that the agency is “losing trust and the ability to protect the nation from future health crises”. The National Public Health Coalition — formed specifically because former and current employees recognized the magnitude of what was being lost — has been documenting the damage report by report, program by program.
Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health organization, stated plainly: “With the loss of funding, workforce, and programs, our country will be less prepared for future health emergencies, Americans’ health will suffer, and healthcare costs will rise”. That is not a political statement. It is an actuarial one, grounded in decades of research on what happens when public health infrastructure erodes.
What State Labs Are Actually Able to Do
In the absence of CDC testing, state public health laboratories are attempting to step up. Many state labs have the equipment and trained staff to conduct preliminary screening for pox viruses, and New York’s Wadsworth Center and California’s state lab can perform confirmatory rabies testing. This is meaningful capacity, and the laboratory professionals who operate these facilities deserve recognition for the work they do.
But state labs face their own resource constraints. They were built to function as part of a tiered national system, not as independent replacements for a federal reference laboratory. State health departments across the country are already dealing with their own budget cuts driven by reductions in federal public health funding. Asking states to absorb the CDC’s confirmatory testing workload without additional funding or staffing is not a realistic solution.
Furthermore, no state laboratory has the mandate, the data infrastructure, or the authority to conduct national disease surveillance. Only the CDC can aggregate data from across all 50 states, identify multistate outbreak patterns, and coordinate a unified national response. That function — arguably the most important one the agency performs — requires people, and those people are leaving.
What You Can Do Right Now
This situation is serious, but it does not mean you are without options. There are concrete, practical steps every American can take to protect themselves and their families given the current state of the national public health infrastructure.
- Understand your rabies risk. If you are bitten or scratched by a wild animal — especially a bat, raccoon, skunk, or fox — seek medical attention immediately, regardless of the animal’s behavior. Do not wait for test results to initiate a conversation with your doctor about PEP. Time is everything.
- Know whether your pet’s rabies vaccination is current. Animal-to-human transmission is the primary route of exposure. Keeping domestic animals vaccinated is one of the most effective interventions available at the individual level.
- Stay informed about mpox. If you develop an unexplained rash, particularly one that begins on the hands, face, or genitals, contact a healthcare provider. Early diagnosis remains possible through state lab screening even if CDC confirmatory testing is unavailable.
- Contact your elected representatives. The funding decisions and staffing reductions at the CDC are the result of specific policy choices. Those choices can be reversed. The Trust for America’s Health and the Association of Public Health Laboratories have both called on Congress to restore CDC funding and workforce capacity.
- Support local public health infrastructure. Your county or state health department is now carrying more of the burden that the CDC previously shouldered. Advocating for their adequate funding is a direct investment in your community’s safety.
The Bigger Picture
What is happening at the CDC right now is not a bureaucratic reorganization. It is a fundamental shift in how seriously the federal government treats its obligation to protect Americans from infectious disease threats.
The United States built the CDC into a globally respected institution over eight decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. It became the world’s model for disease surveillance and outbreak response precisely because it was treated as a critical national security asset — not a discretionary line item. The institutional knowledge being lost right now, the scientists choosing to leave or being forced out, the laboratory capabilities being quietly suspended — these losses will not reverse themselves when the political winds shift. Rebuilding takes time, money, and stability, none of which are guaranteed.
When the next novel pathogen emerges — and it will emerge — the United States will need a CDC that is fully staffed, fully funded, and fully capable of responding within hours, not weeks. The question we are now forced to ask is whether we will have one.
The answer depends, in large part, on whether enough Americans pay attention to what is happening right now, while there is still time to change course.
This article draws on reporting from the New York Times, CNN, CBS News, NPR, KFF Health News, the CIDRAP Center at the University of Minnesota, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, and Trust for America’s Health. All cited statistics reflect data available as of April 2026.
Omisha is a health writer passionate about turning complex medical research into clear, actionable content readers can trust. She covers everything from nutrition and mental wellness to chronic disease management, always grounding her work in credible science and real-world relevance. When she's not writing, she's usually reading up on the latest health studies or exploring new wellness trends to write about next.
