WASHINGTON (Reuters) -West Virginia Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito requested U.S. Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. on Monday to reinstate applications aimed toward defending coal miners that had been hit with layoff notices.
Capito, chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Well being and Human Companies, stated the work completed by the Nationwide Institute for Occupational Security and Well being, a division of HHS, is vital to her coal-producing state and doesn’t duplicate some other authorities program.
HHS introduced widespread layoffs on April 1, together with round 875 of NIOSH’s roughly 1,000-strong workforce.
Round 500 of these staff, who had been from the Morgantown, West Virginia, workplace, labored on growing merchandise and practices to guard coal miners and ran a surveillance program to detect instances of black lung illness, which is on the rise in central Appalachia.
“I’m involved that the RIFs (reductions in pressure) at NIOSH will undermine the important well being applications vital to so many West Virginians. I urge you to deliver again the NIOSH staff instantly to allow them to proceed to help our nation’s coal business,” she wrote in a letter despatched to RFK Jr.
She stated she just lately met with RFK Jr., who she stated agreed with the truth that NIOSH’s work is exclusive.
Reuters reported that the cuts to NIOSH have eliminated key federal protections obtainable to miners, who’re more and more vulnerable to a extra extreme type of black lung illness brought on by publicity to silica mud.
A decades-old program operated by NIOSH to detect lung illness in coal miners has been suspended. Associated applications to offer x-rays and lung assessments at mine websites have additionally shut down.
The lack of employees at NIOSH has additionally crippled black lung-afflicted miners’ means to get relocated with pay as a part of the Half 90 program.
Capito warned that HHS will start the method of decommissioning the labs, together with the West Virginia location, within the coming days, which might value taxpayers hundreds of thousands of {dollars}. Restarting them would additionally add extra prices, she stated.
“I consider within the President’s imaginative and prescient to proper measurement our authorities, however I don’t assume eliminating the NIOSH coal applications and analysis will accomplish that purpose,” she wrote.
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Enhancing by Mark Porter)
Source link