CDC pauses more than two dozen lab tests after downsizing guts its reference labs

The CDC's reference laboratories perform diagnostic testing that state and commercial labs generally cannot — confirmatory rabies testing, mpox typing, and identification of rare or imported pathogens such as the parasites behind "snail fever" and the virus that causes "sloth fever." In the first week of April 2026 the agency posted a directory listing more than two dozen of these tests as unavailable, the broadest pause it has ever imposed at once. The Association of Public Health Laboratories' chief executive, Scott Becker, said it was not clear why so many tests were taken offline, and called the pauses "concerning, only if it's permanent."

The pause followed a year of dramatic downsizing at the CDC through layoffs, retirements, resignations, and the nonrenewal of temporary appointments. Staffing fell by an estimated 20% to 25% across the agency, and the cuts reached the laboratories directly: the poxvirus and rabies labs lost roughly half their prior staff, and the malaria branch was gutted further, according to the National Public Health Coalition, a group of current and former CDC workers. HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon called the pause temporary and the product of "a routine review to uphold our commitment to high quality laboratory testing," saying some tests would return "in the coming weeks."

The abuse recorded here is the executive hollowing out a congressionally-grounded public-health function through workforce reduction; the testing pause is the concrete point at which that lost capacity became operative, not the abuse in itself. While some paused tests cover common infections with commercial alternatives, others have no ready substitute outside a handful of specialized state labs. The "routine review" framing sits uneasily against reporting that ties the pause to staffing losses, and the agency itself could not say when the full menu of tests would resume.