ATLANTA — No federal health agency changed more during the Bush administration than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It got new buildings, new managers and an entirely new operating structure.
A year into the Obama administration, only the new buildings remain. Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the agency’s director since June, has quietly scrapped nearly all the administrative changes that the previous director, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, spent much of her six-year tenure conceiving and carrying out.
Gone are the nonscientific managers whom Dr. Gerberding sprinkled throughout the agency’s top ranks. Gone is a layer of bureaucracy, agency officials said. Gone, too, are the captain’s chairs with cup holders from a conference room so fancy that agency managers dubbed it the Crown Room.
In their place, Dr. Frieden has restored not only much of the agency’s previous organizational structure and scientific managers, but also its drab furniture. And he has brought something new: a frenetic sense of urgency.
The C.D.C. is considered one of the world’s premier public health agencies, responsible for tracking the spread of infectious disease, distributing vaccines and monitoring the causes of sickness and deaths. About three-quarters of its $10 billion annual budget is given out in grants to places like state and local health departments, which collectively lost 16,000 positions last year, according to a recent public health survey, making those grants that much more important.
Dr. Frieden, 49, a former New York City health commissioner, marches around the agency’s Atlanta campus so rapidly that staffers have to trot to keep up. He uses his BlackBerry constantly, sending a stream of brief e-mail messages that are so cryptic that recipients sometimes ask for translations. “Kmi,” for instance, means “keep me informed.”
By the end of her tenure, Dr. Gerberding had become so removed from day-to-day management that some top agency officials went weeks without seeing or hearing from her, they said. Dr. Frieden, by contrast, sometimes wanders the agency’s hallways and drops in on scientists unannounced to ask about their work, both delighting and terrifying them.
In an interview last month, in his 12th-floor office, Dr. Frieden said that when he arrived in June, there was near-universal agreement that change was needed, but nobody wanted a repeat of the disruption Dr. Gerberding’s years-long reorganization had wrought.
“Faced with that, you pull off the Band-Aid quickly,” Dr. Frieden said.
Within two months, Dr. Frieden eliminated the “coordinating centers,” a layer of management Dr. Gerberding had added between the agency’s scientists and top leadership. The Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases, with 600 employees, became the Office of Infectious Diseases, with 12. No one was fired; the agency’s leadership was simply pared.
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Originally Posted by donnay
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