Anyone in the US who’s depended on a respirator to provide protection against dust, smoke, mold or airborne viruses has likely relied on a small but mighty agency within the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assure that they’re shielded from things that could damage their health.
The 1,300-person National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, was established in 1970 to ensure “every man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.”
On Tuesday, an estimated two-thirds of its staff was cut, or about 870 workers, as part of sweeping reductions across federal health agencies that wiped out entire divisions focused on the health and safety of miners, firefighters, health-care workers and others in one day.
“It’s a small thing, but it’s massive in terms of its impact and its importance,” said John McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “And they’ve just wiped it off the face of the Earth.”
Among the most immediate consequences: Ongoing investigations to ensure the safety of lifesaving breathing equipment known as escape devices used in underground mines, in building fires and on naval ships have abruptly stopped, said Rich Metzler, former director of the institute’s National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh.
“Nothing is happening with any investigations related to those products to make sure that they continue to be safe for their intended use, that they continue to perform,” said Metzler, who left the agency in 2005 but still consults for the lab. “What has happened by dismantling these programs has a huge impact on worker safety.”
NIOSH-approved respirators are required by the Environmental Protection Agency to protect against pesticide exposure, Metzler said; the Mine Safety and Health Administration requires them for use in underground mines to protect against coal dust; the Department of Energy requires them for protection against toxic chemicals; and construction workers rely on them to protect against silica dust created in construction projects.
Consumers rely on NIOSH, as well. Many became familiar with its logo during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they were taught to look for it to ensure N95 face masks were the real deal.
Counterfeits are an issue, Metzler said, even now. Just before workers at the Pittsburgh lab were told to stop work last week, he said they’d been testing cartridges sold online that attach to the front of respirators to protect against gases or particulates.
“They found out that none of them met the standard,” Metzler said, while “all of the cartridges that they purchased that were on approved respirators passed.”
“It’s being destroyed. It’s pretty straightforward,” said Dr. David Michaels, professor at the George Washington University Milken School of Public Health and the assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, from 2009 to 2017.
The only two programs left alone, Michaels said, appear to be two that have “mandatory funding which compensates individuals who are sickened in some ways as a result of US government action – that’s the World Trade Center program and the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program.”
The World Trade Center program’s director, though, was fired, Michaels noted, “so it’s hard to say that that’s untouched.”
‘Cut into the bone’
The moves drew immediate reaction from industry, lawmakers and unions representing workers that rely on NIOSH protections. US Sen. Shelley Capito, R-West Virginia, said in a Thursday media briefing that she was having a call with US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ask him to reverse course.
“I’m very concerned about … how they keep our miners [safe] and look at fire equipment to make sure our firemen are safe when they’re working in dangerous situations, as our coal miners are,” Capito said. “I’m hoping to affect a brighter outlook from him that ‘you have cut into the bone here and [affected] an essential service for workplace safety.’ ”
The United Mine Workers of America, a union representing coal miners, said the hundreds of NIOSH workers who were dismissed “literally save the lives of coal miners every day.”
“The announced significant downsizing of offices in Morgantown, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are particularly devastating to the coal industry, which relies on the research done there to improve its safety practices,” the union said in a statement.
The National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, which represents 500 companies that rely on miners to produce building materials, also called on Kennedy to reconsider. The National Waste & Recycling Association called the NIOSH cuts “a step in the wrong direction.”
Edward A. Kelly, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, posted on social media Wednesday that he spoke with the White House “and urged the administration to fully restore these vital programs,” specifically citing the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program and the World Trade Center Health Program.
Kelly said “the call was productive, and they assured me that efforts are underway to reverse these cuts.”
The move was part of a massive overhaul of health agencies that included cuts of 10,000 workers across the CDC, the US Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. HHS called it a “dramatic restructuring in accordance with President Trump’s Executive Order, ‘Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.’”
Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman most closely associated with the DOGE initiatives, has butted heads with organizations designed to protect workers, including the National Labor Relations Board. To Michaels, that appeared to be a potential explanation for why NIOSH, with about a tenth of the CDC’s total employees, sustained more than a third of its 2,500 firings.
A DOGE representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘More than a job’
For Dr. Micah Niemeier-Walsh, the cuts at NIOSH are very personal.
“I’m a third-generation NIOSH researcher,” said Niemeier-Walsh, who also serves as vice president of AFGE Local 3840, a union representing employees at NIOSH and the CDC in Cincinnati. “My grandfather, who raised me, was a toxicologist at NIOSH for 36 years, and it was normal family dinnertime conversation to talk about how you can use science to help protect working people.”
Niemeier-Walsh is part of the firefighter health team at NIOSH, which houses the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer, a congressionally mandated program signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018 to better understand firefighters’ exposures to health risks and to find more effective means of protection.
“This is a really important program,” Niemeier-Walsh said. “We have over 20,000 firefighters that have already registered, and we found out by the end of the day on Tuesday that the site was down.”
The reason given, they said, was “because they laid off all the IT staff, so there’s no one to manage the system.”
Niemeier-Walsh said the most common topic of conversation in the hallways at their NIOSH facility after workers received Reduction in Force notices early Tuesday was, “What’s going to happen to my research? … Who’s going to carry on this necessary work if I can’t do it?”
“This is more than just a job,” Niemeier-Walsh said. “It’s our values.”