More than 1,000 current employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have signed a letter calling for the federal agency to address “ongoing and recurring acts of racism and discrimination” against Black employees, NPR has learned.

In the letter, addressed to CDC Director Robert Redfield and dated June 30, the authors put their call for change in the context of the coronavirus pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Black people and the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks. NPR obtained a copy of the letter, which is published below.

“In light of the recent calls for justice across this country and around the world, we, as dedicated public health professionals, can no longer stay silent to the widespread acts of racism and discrimination within CDC that are, in fact, undermining the agency’s core mission,” the letter reads.

The letter offers a rare glimpse inside a famously opaque federal agency, where career staff often work for decades and information is carefully filtered to the public through the press office.

Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, who was a medical officer at the CDC for 14 years and remains in contact with current employees, says that after the letter was sent to Redfield, it was circulated among the 11,000-person workforce for signatures.

As of Sunday evening, 1,007 staff members had signed the letter — 9% of the agency’s workforce — and the number of signatories is growing, Jones says. She adds that at least one division head signed, and about 300 employees chose to endorse the letter anonymously. Only current CDC employees could sign the letter, and each person could sign it only once, according to Jones. Any CDC employee could sign, not just people of color. The racial breakdown of the signatories was not known.

In a statement to NPR, a CDC spokesman acknowledged that Redfield received the letter and responded to it, adding, “CDC is committed to fostering a fair, equitable, and inclusive environment in which staff can openly share their concerns with agency leadership.”

Jones says her understanding is that Redfield’s response did not address the specific requests for action in the letter. “I find that disheartening and disrespectful,” she says.

In the letter, the authors point to a variety of “well-meaning, yet under-funded” efforts to diversify the agency’s workforce over the past several decades and assert that none of them have made much difference. They note that Black employees represent only 10% of senior leadership and 6% of the CDC’s 2019 class of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a fellowship program described as “the training ground for tomorrow’s leaders within the agency.”

It describes an “old boy/girl network,” where white managers promote white staff while allegedly stifling and discouraging Black staff, and a “pervasive and toxic culture of racial aggressions.” It also says that hundreds of Equal Employment Opportunity complaints have been filed by Black employees in the past decades, many of them unresolved.

“Systemic racism is not just a concept perpetrated outside these walls,” the letter reads. “It is a crushing reality for people of color in their daily lived experiences here at CDC.”

The authors make seven demands for action, including diversifying senior leadership, addressing racism in the CDC’s culture, and publicly declaring racism a public health crisis in the U.S.

The CDC has stumbled in its attempts to address the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black Americans and other communities of color. Although data are incomplete, Black and Latino people in the U.S. are at least two times more likely than white people to die from COVID-19 and three times more likely to get sick.

Congress required the CDC to report data to lawmakers about COVID-19 and racial disparities. But the agency’s first report, sent to lawmakers in May, was panned by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., as a “lazy, four-page copy and paste project” that mostly consisted of links to CDC webpages. The agency’s follow-up in June was longer, but also “incomplete” and “still inadequate to the task at hand,” according to a written statement from Murray.

“CDC has been MIA on race and COVID-19,” says Greg Millett, who worked as a senior scientist there until 2009 and is now at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

“I think that it’s telling that here I am, sitting on the outside, a former CDC employee, and I’ve been able to scoop the agency […] in the data that I’ve been able to publish on COVID-19’s impact on African Americans,” he says. “CDC has still not really come up with anything meaningful about what’s taking place in Black and brown communities around COVID-19. That to me is shameful, and shows that the scientists who are there who can do that work are not necessarily being empowered to do that work.”

“We are hurt. We are angry. We are exhausted,” the authors write. “And ultimately, we fear that, despite the global protests, little will be done to address the systemic racism we face each and every day.”

Failing to address racism’s role in causing health problems, the authors say, “is a key reason why we have witnessed little progress in reducing many of these disparities in the United States over the past 50 years.”

Jones, who left the CDC in 2014, says she feels encouraged to see Black employees organizing to effect change. “When I first saw the letter, it was a feeling of resonance,” she says. “I know that this is no exaggeration.”

Her own work was on racism and public health, and she says she felt thwarted and undermined in her attempts to get the agency to address these issues. She says after a lunchtime presentation she gave on racism, she was asked to remove references to how racism ” ‘unfairly advantages other individuals and communities’ off of my slide because that made white people uncomfortable.”

After she left the CDC, she served as president of the American Public Health Association and taught at the Morehouse School of Medicine.

Although Millett personally felt supported by mentors during his time at the CDC, he says the environment described in the letter resonated with him, too. He’s supportive of the letter’s organizers and hopes it can lead to change at the agency.

“We need more Black scientists at CDC who can help understand what’s taking place in our various communities,” he says. “I do feel that we’re on the precipice of actually changing something here.”

Jones is less hopeful. She says there are troubling consequences to the sidelining of Black scientists at the CDC, including from working on the impact of COVID-19 on their own communities.

“We are squandering genius,” she says. “We’re squandering insight. We’re squandering talent within CDC that could then lead CDC’s mission to address the health issues of the nation.”

The revelation that Fox News prime-time star Tucker Carlson’s top writer had posted racist, sexist and homophobic sentiments online for years under a pseudonym has led to renewed scrutiny of Carlson’s own commentaries, which have inspired a series of advertising boycotts.

On Monday, Carlson is set to address the growing controversy, which led to the resignation of the writer, Blake Neff, after questions were raised by CNN’s Oliver Darcy. It also led to a condemnation of Neff’s views by the network’s chief executive.

In an internal memo, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace called the postings “horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior.” Neff had, among other things, assailed the intelligence of Black Americans, African immigrants and Asian Americans, according to CNN. He also repeatedly demeaned a woman, posting details about her dating life and mocking her on personal terms.

Carlson has publicly cited the importance of the value of Neff’s work on his show and for Carlson’s earlier book. The host has courted criticism repeatedly for severe rhetoric, especially toward people of color, immigrants and women.

“I think his show is very close to what his writer, Blake Neff was doing, apparently anonymously for five years,” former CNN and NBC host Soledad O’Brien, who is Black and Latina, tells NPR. On his program, she says, Carlson is “anti-immigrant, he’s frequently racist. He says despicable things about women, he says despicable things about Asians. He says despicable things about Latinos. He talks about the kind of people who ‘hate’ America.”

President Trump is known to be a frequent viewer and often cites Carlson’s arguments publicly. In recent days, some Republican strategists have even looked to Carlson as a Republican presidential candidate in 2024 should Trump lose this November.

The irony is that even as Carlson has just set a record for viewers for any cable news show in the history of the industry in this country, sponsors are peeling away.

An estimated 4.3 million Americans tuned in to watch his program each night for the second quarter of this year — more than anyone ever in cable news. And yet Disney, Papa John’s, and T-Mobile are among the most recent major advertisers who have pulled commercials from the show, in their cases, citing his remarks about Black Lives Matter protests.

“This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through, but it is definitely not about Black lives,” Carlson said in early June. “Remember that when they come for you. And at this rate, they will.” (A Fox News spokesperson told reporters that “they” referred to Democrats, not Black protesters.)

Fox did not comment beyond the memo from Scott and Wallace, which was shared with reporters and offered neither support nor criticism for Carlson. The two executives also announced that Carlson would address the controversy on his program Monday. Carlson declined several requests for comment from NPR.

These concerns are not new, along with pressures on and from advertisers.

Back in 2018, for example, Carlson told his viewers: “Our leaders demand we shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.”

Fox News is part of Rupert Murdoch’s larger media empire. Last year, Joseph Azam, a former lawyer and senior vice president for Murdoch’s publishing arm, told NPR that Carlson’s comments on immigration and rhetoric from other Fox News hosts led him to leave the company. Azam is Muslim and an immigrant from Afghanistan.

Just last week, Carlson questioned the patriotism of two Democratic members of Congress who are both women of color: Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who immigrated from Somalia, and Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, whose mother is Thai of Chinese descent.

Duckworth is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. She lost both her legs and partial use of an arm when a helicopter she was piloting was shot down by Iraqi insurgents in 2004. After Duckworth tweeted in response that Carlson should “walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America,” Carlson escalated his attacks the next night, calling her a “coward” and a “fraud.”

On his show, Carlson has hosted Pete D’Abrosca, who has expressed sympathy for alt-right leaders; the British commentator Katie Hopkins, banned from Twitter for violating its hateful conduct policy and who told his viewers that white Christian women were “endangered”; and disgraced U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who Carlson defended for tweeting that America could not “restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Similarly, the Daily Caller, a publication which Carlson co-founded and in which he owned a major stake until last month, has repeatedly faced public outcry over various contributors and staffers who were revealed to have written white supremacist rhetoric on other platforms and outlets.

White nationalists including David Duke and Richard Spencer have hailed Carlson’s show as echoing their own talking points. For his part, Carlson has called the idea of white supremacy in the U.S. a hoax.

“Tucker’s show itself skates that line very closely,” says O’Brien, now an independent television host, reporter and producer. “He’s a guy who’s beloved by white supremacists. I mean, clearly, they say so. That is an indication that he says the kinds of things that they like to hear. He frames arguments that are basically white supremacist argument. He’s not going to use the N-word on TV, certainly. But I think he goes right up to that line.”

Last year, when the liberal watchdog Media Matters published a series of offensive past remarks Carlson had made about women on radio shows, the Fox News host issued his own challenge in return:

“Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch.”

His Monday show, on which he is to address his former writer’s writings, begins 8 p.m. ET.

President Trump issued his first pardon in August 2017, just about seven months into his presidency. Three years and three dozen clemencies later, some patterns have emerged.

One clear pattern is Trump’s tendency to grant clemency to prominent political figures and people who have shown loyalty to him, clemency scholars say. That propensity was on full display on Friday, as Trump commuted the sentence of his former campaign adviser Roger Stone. Stone was just days away from beginning a 40-month prison term for lying to lawmakers investigating Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election.

“Modern presidents have sullied clemency through disuse (both Bushes) and occasional self-serving grants (Clinton),” Mark Osler, a law professor and clemency scholar at the University of St. Thomas’ School of Law, told NPR via email. “However, no president has ever used clemency primarily to reward friends and political allies” — until Trump.

In announcing the commutation Friday, the White House called Stone a “victim of the Russia Hoax” and said he “has already suffered greatly.”

Presidents can grant clemency through both commutations, which reduce a prison sentence but do not erase a conviction, and pardons, which express presidential “forgiveness” and can restore certain civil rights.

With only a handful of exceptions, Osler said, Trump’s clemency grants have gone to “people he knows or learned about from Fox News.” On a single day in February, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 11 people, all of whom had one thing in common: either their cases were promoted on Fox News or they had an inside connection to the president.

Trump also prefers to disregard the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice, said American University professor Jeffrey Crouch, who has written extensively on the presidential pardon power. That office is responsible for vetting the thousands of clemency requests the government gets every year.

For over a century, presidents have relied on the recommendations of that office. Not so for Trump, who prefers to make his own decisions. A Washington Post investigation found that most of Trump’s grants of clemency “have gone to well-connected offenders who had not filed petitions with the pardon office or did not meet its requirements.”

“He has largely ignored the little guy, or anonymous offenders who apply for presidential mercy through the usual channels,” Crouch told NPR. “Under President Trump, the old back door to clemency — getting the president’s attention somehow — seems to have become the new front door.”

Trump’s first pardon went to former Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court after he continued detaining suspected undocumented immigrants after a judge warned him to stop targeting Latino drivers. Arpaio’s pardon did not go through the pardon attorney’s office. And that first pardon would set the tone for many of Trump’s pardons and commutations to come.

The president’s clemency power is supposed to exist solely to protect the national interest, said professor Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Rozell cited Alexander Hamilton’s pronouncement in the Federalist Papers that it’s better to give this power to the president — “a single man of prudence and good sense” — than to a legislative body like Congress.

The Founding Fathers never anticipated that a president would use his power as Trump has, Rozell said. “There is nothing in Trump’s pardons of political allies and cronies that meets the national interest standard,” Rozell told NPR. “It is a mockery of the constitutional power vested in him.”

Trump isn’t the only president to use his power to help allies. Rozell cited what he called “some egregiously bad examples of the use of the pardon power” — Bill Clinton’s pardons of Marc Rich and others on his last day in office, and George H.W. Bush’s pardons of six Iran-Contra scandal figures, issued after he lost his bid for reelection. But “no one has violated the principles underlying the pardon power so much as [Trump] has,” Rozell said.

Trump’s immediate predecessor also faced criticism for his use of clemency powers. By the end of his two terms, Barack Obama had proudly granted more commutations than any other president in history — most of his later clemencies went to low-level criminals, especially those convicted of drug offenses with harsh penalties.

And some of Obama’s clemencies drew harsh criticism, especially from conservatives — such as his commutation for Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of sharing classified information, or Oscar López Rivera, a Puerto Rican activist who had served 35 years of a 55-year sentence after his organization set off more than 100 bombs in the 1970s and ’80s.

“I don’t see these in the same category, though, as granting clemency to someone who was convicted of lying to protect the president who later pardoned him,” Rozell said.

The Roger Stone commutation has been highly controversial, both among Democratic lawmakers and among some members of Trump’s own party. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney called it “unprecedented, historic corruption.” But Trump doesn’t seem so concerned about how his clemency decisions could impact his approval rating, Crouch said, calling the timing “very unusual.”

Most controversial clemency grants by several recent presidents came only after those presidents were “free from electoral consequences,” Crouch said. But the Stone commutation “came just four months before the president will stand for reelection.”