For greater than half a century, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a division of the Division of Well being & Human Companies (HHS), has labored to enhance office security and to check the consequences on staff of exposures to toxins comparable to lead. Its groups of epidemiologists, occupational nurses, specialist docs, toxins consultants, and others do every thing from going into prescription drugs manufacturing websites to observe for harmful ranges of pharmaceutical mud, to creating positive the air flow at hashish processing amenities is protected, to investigating fatalities and accidents at building websites.
One of many NIOSH items displays firefighters affected by cancers attributable to publicity to toxins; one other, based mostly out of Morgantown, West Virginia, research respiratory illnesses that coal miners are liable to. Nonetheless one other works on the well being dangers confronted by first responders on the World Commerce Middle web site after the 9/11 assaults. It runs a lab that certifies respiratory tools utilized by firefighters and coal miners. The company additionally helps practice nongovernment industrial hygienists to copy among the analysis NIOSH groups have been doing.
All of that’s now threatened. The demolition of the company was, industrial hygienist Hannah Echt advised me, “Sort of like a giant FU for every thing.”
“Numerous us wished to work in these jobs as a result of we wished a job in public service,” Echt added. “They’re not even saying ‘thanks,’ they’re saying ‘you’re finished. Get an actual job.’”
NIOSH is a congressionally created, and funded, company, having been established as a part of the bigger Occupational Security and Well being Act in 1970. It has roughly 1,300 employees unfold across the nation, in workplaces in Washington, D.C.; Ohio; West Virginia; Alaska; Pennsylvania; Washington; Georgia and Colorado. Taken as an entire, even if the agency’s budget is only $363 million — which interprets to a little bit over two {dollars} per 12 months per U.S. employee — the company’s staff do among the most necessary public well being and labor security work within the nation, finishing up, on the request each of employers and of staff and commerce unions, evaluations, after which remediation, of probably harmful workplaces. The company additionally does well being monitoring of significantly at-risk classes of staff, comparable to firefighters and coal miners.
If any company must have bipartisan assist, it’s one which helps sick firefighters — a number of research projects in recent years have found that firefighters have a statistically more significant likelihood of developing cancer than does the population at large, though the exact numbers are somewhat hard to quantify — together with dying coal miners and first responders to home terror assaults. However, in Trump 2.0 that’s now not the case.
HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved NIOSH from beneath the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) and positioned it beneath the auspices of the newly created Administration for a Wholesome America, the place it was summarily dismembered. Three months into the Trump presidency, NIOSH’s employees — like so many different staff at public well being, labor security, shopper rights and environmental businesses — is dealing with a wholesale destruction of their jobs and establishment, leaving a gaping gap within the nation’s potential to make sure protected workplaces and rising the probability of lethal office accidents, poisonous exposures and continual sicknesses. These are the collateral penalties of the frenzy to roll again rules and to liberate American business from the pesky prices of presidency oversight beneath Elon Musk’s so-called “Division of Authorities Effectivity” (DOGE).
In reality, the antipathy towards businesses that work to guard the U.S.’s staff, particularly these additional down the earnings chain, is among the most seen leitmotifs operating via Trump 2.0. On the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, 1,400 out of 1,700 staffers had been fired in an early April purge. DOGE has cancelled the leases for numerous regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and large-scale job cuts on the NLRB are doubtless. On the identical time, OSHA’s ability to enforce new workplace standards and regulations looks to be in jeopardy. Effectively over three thousand staffers on the Food and Drug Administration are being fired; and a pair of,400 staff on the CDC are additionally being let go. The overwhelming majority of employees on the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health have been canned. And the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice has been pressured to fireside most of its group.
After which, to pour salt into the wound, there’s the all-out assault on NIOSH. Someplace within the area of 900 of the company’s staff have been despatched Discount-in-Drive (RIF) notices telling them to anticipate to be fired in June; this represents almost 10 p.c of your entire staffing cuts which have been foisted on the sprawling Division of Well being & Human Companies up to now. The RIF letters had been a mix of brutal and saccharine, asserting that due to a Discount in Drive their providers would now not be required, after which concluding, “Thanks on your understanding and cooperation throughout this difficult time,” in keeping with Echt. Directors on the company have already been placed on administrative go away, in order that regardless that they’re nonetheless formally employed till the beginning of June, in actuality they’re already prohibited from doing any NIOSH work.
So excessive are the cuts that when one clicks on the company’s web site, a banner atop the entrance web page declares, “Due to the reduction in force across NIOSH, no new health hazard evaluation requests can be accepted.”
None of this vandalism-like destruction, both at NIOSH or the opposite businesses, has been accredited by Congress; and but, the cuts are prone to stand just because the GOP majority reveals completely no real interest in pushing again towards them. Astoundingly, within the 12 months 2025, the U.S. authorities is rolling again regulatory businesses which have existed, in some circumstances, for greater than a century. And this rollback is happening not as a result of there may be mass public assist for it, however as a result of Donald Trump’s inside circle is intent on smashing to smithereens any company that protects the general public’s well being, its working situations and its atmosphere from the evermore predatory actions of the U.S.’s new oligarchy.
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