It Was Hard With My Disability, But I Made Things Easier for Other Staff
Education
In 2003, when I was a junior in high school in north Georgia, I started taking classes at a cheerleading and gymnastics gym that had a fall pit filled with Styrofoam to cushion landings of the students who were mastering new techniques. I jumped into the pit, broke the 5th vertebra in my neck, and was paralyzed, losing the use of my lower body and hands.
After a little more than three months of rehabilitation at Shepherd Spinal Center in Atlanta, I was able to return to high school and complete my senior year to graduate. That milestone convinced me that I could go ahead and attend college without having to take a break, but I knew it had to be somewhere close to my family support network. I entered Berry College in August 2004 and graduated in December 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in government. It was expensive, but it was a great school.
First CDC Job
That next fall, I was living in rural northwest Georgia with my family when I saw a notice about a CDC career fair for people with disabilities. My high school wrestling coach was a very large influence on my life. One of the major reasons I survived my disabling injury was the mental toughness he instilled in our team. For 3 months out of the year, we would spend 3 hours a day, every day, in a 600 square foot room with two gas heaters on full blast. We rarely took days off. It built a sense of resilience in you, and ingrained a mental toughness that was almost impossible to break. Without that mental toughness, I don't know if I would have survived, much less thrived. When he heard that I was going to a career fair for people with disabilities at CDC, he asked me if he could make a phone call. He called his sister who was a CDC veteran. She then set up an informational interview for us to talk.
The informational interview led to several additional interviews with leaders of various units within CDC’s chronic disease unit. One of them offered me a position as an administrative assistant under Schedule A authority, a regulation that permits the hiring of qualified people with disabilities on a noncompetitive basis for a preliminary 2-year period. With the knowledge that the heart disease and stroke prevention group already had been promised a full-time, permanent administrative position at my level, I accepted the offer in December of 2011 and started looking for an apartment in Duluth, a northern Atlanta suburb.
This was a little scary because it was the first time I was out on my own. On top of that, I needed morning and night caregivers as well as transportation to and from work. I moved in with a roommate who had been my best friend throughout high school and he brought me to work in the mornings until he got a job. Gas prices came down eventually, but at one point I had to spend $600/month to fuel a full-size accessible van which got 11 miles to the gallon. This was just to get to work in the mornings. In the afternoons, I rode public transportation. I did not know that Gwinnett County has its own separate bus system which is linked to MARTA buses; this meant I left the office at 5 pm and got home at 7:45 because I had to take three different buses in two different transportation systems. When I originally saw that the apartment was “right next to a bus stop,” I just assumed it was MARTA, and not a separate Gwinnett system. Not wanting to spend close to three hours on the bus every afternoon, I moved closer to CDC’s campus as soon as I had the opportunity. First, I settled in North DeKalb County for a year, then rented in Tucker for two years before I bought a place of my own close by. I lived there from 2015 until 2022.
My initial duties as an admin assistant included making travel arrangements for more senior staff who had to visit CDC-funded sites, attend conferences, testify at Congressional hearings, and so on. I also kept employee time and attendance records, managed our associate director’s schedule, booked conference rooms, tracked travel expenditures, and procured office supplies—anything that could be handed off to me so my colleagues could concentrate on their scientific work and leadership responsibilities. From this admin vantage point, I gained an incredible amount of organizational knowledge—I knew what form was required and who to send it to for every aspect of day-to-day operations.
In my spare minutes, I studied special software called SharePoint, a collaborative platform designed to track and manage information. I started keeping track of things in it, became an expert, built a database, and set up a file management system which streamlined the administrative workflow of my unit. This wasn’t easy when you can’t use your hands.
Later CDC Jobs
The SharePoint innovation caught the attention of our Center’s informatics office, to which I was assigned on a temporary basis to help with side work when I could. There I created an online form that collected all the information needed for every aspect of “on-boarding” new employees, except their Social Security numbers which were shielded by law from widespread distribution. My on-boarding form was still in use six years later.
For the most part, the relatively few accommodations I required to do my job were put into place quickly. They included speech-to-text software and an easy-to-use trackball mouse. But travel remained a challenge, and our building lacked an accessible bathroom. I had submitted a request for one but the facilities office was dragging its feet, so I was forced to use a urine catheter and go outside to empty it in the bushes because I didn't know where to go that was accessible. Somebody apparently saw me, because one day my supervisor brought it up to me. It just happened to catch me on a day where I had other frustrations. Frankly, I just broke down emotionally at that point. In tears, I just said I didn't know what to do and didn't know anyone with my experience that I could ask. She just nodded and said, “Let me make a phone call.” She spoke to one of her superiors about the matter that very afternoon and an accessible bathroom was completed in two weeks. I learned later that those two really stepped up for me and really gave it to the facilities office.
Over time, I quietly gained a wealth of technical and organizational knowledge. My new supervisor and higher leadership realized that my best contributions were outside of admin assistance, and my duties were slated to change. I was relieved because my new supervisor set a very high tempo when it came to the pace of the office operations. It was difficult to keep up with everything when I was already in the office from 6:30 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Friday and occasionally came in on weekends to catch up.
However, before those job duties changed, I got an opportunity for a detail with the person who originally helped me get to CDC. That detail turned into a permanent job that I would stay at for the next 10 years. When I left for my new position, the contractor who replaced me lasted just one week, due to the office pace. It felt good for leadership to see all of the effort that goes into the things that happen behind the scenes when it comes to administrative work.
Final CDC Job
Towards the (possible) end of my tenure at CDC, my title was program and management analyst, but I functioned as a health communication specialist. For example, during the CDC-wide Clean State initiative in 2023–2024, CDC was redesigning every static public webpage and making dramatic cuts to the number of pages in an effort to consolidate duplicated information. My division started with over 2400 pages and ended up with around 240. We had to ask, do we need a page, can it be cut down, can it be combined with something else? The CDC Office of Communications introduced a new content editor that meant, instead of having a contractor do the rewrites, communication specialists could create and edit webpages on their own. Then there were several clearance steps for each draft page and the steps all had to be tracked. The point of contact for the Clean Slate project team had a health emergency, so I had to convince our new supervisor that I could manage the task. I built a system to track progress while I was still learning the new content editor, and did some clever things that used AI to facilitate copying and pasting large amounts of content when pictures were normally unavailable. In the end, after we met our deadline for completing our 22 sites and 240 pages, I had become the point of contact for all things web-related.
Proudest Achievements
There are two:
Becoming a project coordinator/manager back when I was still officially doing admin work. I thought we could do e-learning better within our divisions and, at the invitation of the branch chief and the person who helped me get to CDC, I accepted a temporary assignment to the population health unit. She described a pet project, but didn’t know how to bring it to life. It ultimately turned into the Virtual Healthy School, an online resource that allows a user to go through each room of a model healthy school, click on objects, and get information and policies pertaining to it. For instance, you could click on a water station and find out about the importance of clean water in a school setting, the threats to it, and how to ensure its availability. I designed the interface, collected information from subject matter experts, worked with our partners to make sure that the tool met their needs, and got everything approved. It was released 2 years after I started work on it, and later I added two rooms and a conversation with a healthy school council. This project was launched on time and within budget and, in December 2016, I got the CDC employee of the month award for it. I had already won a couple of Center awards, but this CDC-level award was really something—I got to meet Dr. Freidan, the CDC Director, a few weeks before he was set to depart.
Clean Slate. You just had to be there. We were building the airplane while it was in the air, we had to be done before landing, and we had a deadline for landing. We had to push it out over our objections that the timeline might not be feasible; emotions were running high because content specialists wanted to retain every bit of sometimes cumbersome technical detail, when the whole purpose of Clean Slate was to make sure our web content was using plain language that the general public could understand. Our team lead was a generational mind in health communication, but couldn’t do a monumental task like Clean Slate all by herself. I couldn’t supply any of the subject matter, but I could rewrite text in plain language and had absorbed many of the other principles of health communication over a couple years of just filling in for communications staff as needed. It wasn’t until after Clean Slate that I realized how much knowledge and expertise that I absorbed from working on the initiative and under the tutelage of our communications team lead. After Clean Slate, I had planned to transition into an official health communication slot; I wanted to do health communication full time.
Impact of My Work
As one example of my impact, I’ll describe the result of another breakroom conversation. I was asked to work on making our division-level automated admin tools available more broadly. As one of a small group of four, we created a new online resource and called it the Vault. It consisted of eight modules, such as travel and procurement requests, and automated budget tracking. At its peak, the Vault was used by 1,400 users and processed some 5,000 forms a month. I worked on its conception, design, and actual creation, and some of its features would eventually make their way to the agency-wide EASI system. An example of the savings it represented to the government is that, for procurement using a divisional credit card, processing time was reduced from 12 days to 3.9 days. Each division head could view the content, and purchases were automatically routed to approvers. Making programs originally developed for our division available for use at the center level to would have cost around $6–8 million dollars or more if it had been contracted out (I know, because Deloitte pitched their own version of a similar module so there was an opportunity to compare the price), but it didn’t cost us a cent. We already had the software, and my colleagues and I did the work. We started by only using our spare time until the system went into production; then we were approved to use some of our official time.
Leaving CDC
After covid, CDC allowed telework. I sold my house and moved to Gadsden, AL, where my mom now lives. I spent the last two weeks of my employment with the agency, 120 hours, changing the word gender to the word sex. It was awful. It wasn’t scientifically needed. It was, however, my job as a federal employee under the executive branch.
The original Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) statement was issued on March 27, potentially signaling the end of the chronic disease unit at CDC. After that, there was radio silence until early in the morning of April 1, when I got a short email. It was soulless, ambiguous—conveying little information except to say that our whole unit had been cut so there would be no bump-and-retreat rights (which were required by law) and I would be separated in 60 days. Subsequently, we were given a severance calculator. We learned that employees eligible for retirement were required to retire, but not that they had to apply for retirement or how to do so, given that CDC’s HR staff had been cut. The CDC Office of Communication was cut, there was no information for the first 2 weeks, and only a trickle when the information did start to come out.
I was placed on administrative leave, and prohibited from working during the required 60-day notice period, so I started a pet project—creating an artificial intelligence model that was trained on Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) statistics. I also created a custom ChatGPT that drew from official sources like the Reduction in Force (RIF) Handbook from OPM, federal regulations, and formal public announcements. You could ask it a question about the RIF regulations and get a surprisingly accurate answer. It might be a little off due to your individual circumstances, but generally answers any questions relating to the RIF accurately.
Future Plans
Although I’ve applied for a job with a nonprofit, I still plan to file for disability retirement. In my situation, stability has to be my #1 concern—without something stable, I could be in a nursing home at the age of 39. I actually and repeatedly increased efficiency a decade before any of this was going on. On the surface, it may not look like my work products transfer that well to the private sector, but my core skills are very valuable and I have a ton of them. But I want to work for my country, and I would like to be reinstated—helping people is in my nature.
Other Comments
I found out quickly that you may have rights on paper, but it’s a whole different story when that’s tested by a bad faith actor. So many rules were broken during the RIF process.
The press has covered how the terminations affected Federal workers, but people on the outside truly don’t understand that public health is being systematically dismantled. They’re losing a ton of organizational knowledge and they just don’t realize or care that these changes will set our nation back by decades.
So many experts have been lost. Although Secretary Kennedy said no working scientists had been cut, they actually represented 60% of the cuts at CDC, across a wide range of specialties. Gone—just “poof”—after decisions were made behind closed doors. People don’t realize how many dedicated scientists were working behind the scenes on things that the public would never read about, but would benefit from.
My mom asked me how long it would take the system to recover, and I told her that, at the rate it’s going, it would take decades.