Trump Team Derailed Corporate America’s Most Valuable Consultant

For decades, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has been one of the best deals the federal government has to offer. At a cost of about $1 per American per year, Niosh, a quiet little agency tucked inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conducts or funds most of the country’s research into workplace harms. Its scientists operate like a world-class source of free consulting, working across a massive range of fields to provide the kind of research, development and training that businesses rarely love paying for themselves. Niosh scientists are responsible for evaluating the risks of new chemicals, testing and certifying the effectiveness of N95 masks, monitoring mine cave-in hazards and administering the health-care program for Sept. 11 heroes. Essentially the agency amounts to a first line of defense for workers and a secret weapon for businesses. Earlier this year, the Trump administration decided to blow it up.

The layoff emails started landing around 5 a.m. on April Fools’ Day. Some of the messages, sent by the human resources office of the US Department of Health and Human Services, said the recipients’ jobs would soon be eliminated to “make America healthier.” By comparing notes in frantic group texts, Niosh scientists concluded the planned terminations totaled about 90% of the agency’s roughly 1,000 employees, including the director, John Howard, who’d been running the place for 22 of the past 23 years. Some staff and managers recall crying in meetings or feeling like the wind had been knocked out of them. Still, many acted quickly to mitigate what damage they could, like the professional safety nerds they are.

“We all gathered in the hallway, and we were like, ‘What does this mean for my research?’ ” says Micah Niemeier-Walsh, a Niosh union officer who studies firefighting hazards for the agency in Cincinnati. In Pittsburgh staffers scrambled to complete a guide to spotting faulty personal protective equipment (PPE) and to document the dangerous chemicals in their lab so someone could safely dispose of them. In Morgantown, West Virginia, scientists called around in search of new homes for their lab animals. The mice they couldn’t relocate were euthanized.

Micah Niemeier-Walsh.

Photographer: Amy Lynn Powell for Bloomberg Businessweek

The impact of the April layoff notices was sweeping. On its website, Niosh notified the public that it had stopped taking requests to screen miners for lung disease, investigate firefighter deaths, certify N95s and other PPE, and visit workplaces seeking safety advice. The federal mine safety agency said it would hold off on enforcing a rule that restricted exposure to cancer-causing silica dust in coal mines, citing Niosh cuts as a threat to the supply of reliable PPE needed to comply with it.

Interviews with more than 40 current or recent employees throughout Niosh, as well as dozens of other people who’ve worked with the agency, detail how the cuts have quietly upended safety research on everything from fracking to opioids, along with chemical risks in nail salons, electric-vehicle fires and terror attacks. One Niosh employee, who, like many others, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid becoming a target, compared the spectacle to a child pulling the wings off of a butterfly. (Employees who spoke on the record emphasized that they were doing so as individuals or as members of their union, not on behalf of the agency.)

During the first Trump administration, the Rand Corp. estimated that Niosh’s work was worth billions of dollars a year to the US. Now it’s become a symbol of Donald Trump’s deepening cuts to the nation’s civil service. Many of its scientists are stuck on administrative leave, waiting to see if federal courts let the president terminate them. Others have already left the agency and taken jobs elsewhere. All of this is hurting the US’s safety infrastructure in ways that won’t be easily undone, says Gregory Wagner, a public-health professor at Harvard University and former Niosh division director. “It’s a Humpty Dumpty problem,” he says. “It’s a mortgaging of our future.”

Many businesses have been unusually direct in their opposition to the resulting chaos. Food, construction and health-care companies quickly teamed up with worker advocates to plead with lawmakers to help reverse the cuts, which they wrote in a letter would devastate “millions of American workers whose lives and livelihoods are protected by NIOSH’s efforts.” The US Chamber of Commerce joined the manufacturing, mining and explosives lobbies in writing directly to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., warning him against following through with planned layoffs. In their letter, the Chamber and its fellow signatories suggested that the absence of the agency’s PPE certification could well “make it more difficult and less safe for manufacturers to make things here in America.”

Claudio Dente, the co-founder of a small PPE maker called Dentec Safety Specialists Corp., which has contracted with the US government, echoes that sentiment. He says that without Niosh’s certification lab, the flood of cheaper, sketchier alternatives would force him to stop making some of his products. “It would make my respirator business worthless,” says Dente, and he’s been holding off on getting a new, more comfortable model certified and bringing it to market because of the uncertainty. A person familiar with the matter says 3M Co. and some of its rivals told lawmakers privately they might have to shift PPE certification abroad if Niosh didn’t resume doing that work. (3M said in a statement that it remains committed to producing PPE in the US.)

In response to detailed inquiries from Bloomberg Businessweek, HHS said in a statement: “Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, the nation’s critical public health functions remain intact and effective. The Trump Administration is committed to protecting essential services like those that support coal miners and firefighters through NIOSH.”

Kennedy said in May that he’d rescinded some of the April Fools’ Day layoffs. But a couple of weeks after that announcement, he proposed a budget that would eliminate about 80% of Niosh’s total funding—including zeroing out the PPE certification program, whose staff he’d supposedly just unfired. HHS has also suggested it will move what’s left of Niosh out of the CDC and into Kennedy’s new Administration for a Healthy America to deliver “better health outcomes for the American people.” Xavier Becerra, Kennedy’s Biden-era predecessor as HHS secretary, says the mass firings and shuttering of key programs make it clear to him that better health outcomes aren’t the priority: “If you really want to fight fires, you don’t sell the fire engines.”

Niosh is something like a cousin to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the US Department of Labor agency charged with enforcing workplace safety rules. Both were created by the same law, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970. But whereas a call from OSHA can make the boss break out in hives, companies often invite Niosh in for help. “Their track record is unbiased, bipartisan, science-based,” says Michael E. Hoffman, chief executive officer of the National Waste & Recycling Association, one of the trade groups that’s been urging the White House to reconsider the Niosh cuts. “They tackle challenging issues and go do the work.”

Boeing Co. has worked with Niosh to improve airplane ventilation. Chemical giant Dow Inc. has incorporated the agency’s guidance on worker wellness. General Motors Co. adopted a Niosh equation to calculate how much its workers could safely lift. The agency’s research aided the National Park Service in curbing houseboat carbon monoxide emissions and guided schools’ efforts to rein in harmful pesticide use. In recent years its recommendations have helped protect construction workers from breathing in silica dust, oilfield workers from breathing in toxic fumes and fishermen from getting sucked into winches and crushed. Its science is also the basis for much of OSHA’s work. “OSHA, without Niosh, is wearing a blindfold,” says Becerra.

Because work is connected to just about everything in the US, Niosh has also been an important part of the country’s response to anthrax, wildfires, Hurricane Katrina and, of course, Covid-19. Congress has imposed additional responsibilities over the years, including studying miners’ safety, firefighters’ cancer cases and Sept. 11 survivors’ health conditions. Each of these duties can also yield unexpected secondary benefits. The mine research, for example, is now being applied in Kentucky to help a different industry store something flammable: bourbon.

Niosh staffers didn’t expect to become a major Trump target. They mostly work far from the Beltway on popular initiatives in line with Trump’s stated priorities, such as helping miners. But there were warning signs: Speaking to a Christian college last September, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought told students that most CDC employees “do not even do public health” and said of their research, “Who knows if it’s relevant or not? And so they’ve even themselves had to admit they were a failure in the public-health crisis that comes once in a generation.” The following month, at a Madison Square Garden preelection rally with Elon Musk, Trump pledged to let Kennedy “go wild on health.” Once he won, he tapped Musk to start the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Kennedy to lead HHS and Vought—who’d enthused about making bureaucrats “traumatically affected”—to run the White House Office of Management and Budget.

By the end of January, sweeping directives banned Niosh workers from spending money, traveling or communicating with the public, which employees say paralyzed much of their work. Scientists who’d driven six hours to train healthcare workers were ordered to turn around, a person familiar says. Then came a series of variations on the playbook used in other parts of the federal workforce: the mass firings of probationary staff, the Musk-style “fork in the road” email urging staffers to take buyouts, the mandate to root out any whiff of DEI. A Niosh scientist studying fatigue-related hazards recalls getting a phone call from a higher-up who asked him to comb through a paper he’d submitted and flag any use of newly restricted words like “gender.” In a training document viewed by Businessweek, employees were told to steer clear of 17 offending words or phrases, including “bias.”

Vought’s office pushed for the massive cuts that landed on April 1, according to people familiar with the matter. A confidential DOGE memo sent around that time warned of “litigation risk” from interfering with numerous specific responsibilities Congress had assigned to Niosh. This quickly proved true, as workers and state attorneys general alike filed lawsuits seeking to undo the layoffs. In mid-May a West Virginia judge issued the first of several injunctions that have temporarily shielded Niosh functions and staff, ruling in favor of a miner who argued that Kennedy was illegally halting legally mandated worker screenings for black lung disease.

In Washington, DC, officials at the CDC presented a series of unfiring proposals to health department and budget office higher-ups, who sought to reverse as few layoffs as possible while alleviating blowback, according to people familiar with the matter. When called to testify before the Senate health committee in mid-May, Kennedy announced that he’d brought back 328 of the Niosh staff who’d been slated for termination, but he framed the reduction of his “metastasizing” agency as a moral imperative. He warned that “exploding debt is a social determinant of health” and said: “We intend to do more, a lot more, with less.” When pressed by lawmakers about specific cuts such as those at Niosh, he characterized them as misunderstood, reversible or somebody else’s idea.

For the workers in limbo—and at least a few senators—much of Kennedy’s testimony was mystifying. He told Washington Democrat Patty Murray that “the work at Niosh will not be interrupted,” even though the agency had already acknowledged it had been. Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski warned that laying off the agency’s marine safety team “could effectively leave our fishing fleet out of compliance with Coast Guard safety regs.” (Kennedy said, “You should talk to me about that.”) When New Jersey Democrat Andy Kim demanded to know why the Sept. 11 health-care program and a firefighters cancer registry had been gutted, Kennedy said that he’d restored the 9/11 health program and that he didn’t know what was up with the firefighters. He declined to say whether the Sept. 11 program would be restored to full strength or whether he’d known he was slashing it in the first place. He also repeatedly called Cincinnati “Cleveland.”

Kennedy told the lawmakers he hadn’t fired any working scientists, which wasn’t true. A week after the hearing, some of the epidemiologists, ergonomists and other scientists losing their jobs held a rally outside his office, alongside miners and nurses whose signs warned, “Some cuts don’t heal.” Catherine Blackwood, an immunologist from West Virginia, told the crowd, “I’m a scientist, and I was fired.” She urged Kennedy to talk to her and her colleagues: “Each of us is a data point.”

By that time, some Niosh scientists were bringing their own hand soap to the office, because no custodial staff were left to restock dispensers. Others were fielding calls from mine operators asking if Niosh could make one more visit to assess their outstanding problems while they still had the chance, or if they could buy the agency’s equipment for their own use. And some had been scrambling to find outside groups they could hand off their data to, until word came down from the CDC that that wasn’t allowed.

“There is no plan for anything,” a longtime Niosh leader told Businessweek. “We’re not allowed to make plans.”

Employees say Niosh’s gutting has derailed safety projects that touch just about every corner of US work. Niosh devices that detect mine cave-in hazards have been collecting data no one is left to review. The team that sets recommended exposure limits for a slew of toxic substances and carcinogens was disbanded while it was in the process of updating its numbers for lead. A report that Becerra had prioritized about shielding millions of workers from wildfire smoke is frozen at the draft stage. The cuts also halted research into the impacts of mold exposure on heart disease, of trendy artificial-stone countertop production on lungs and of “forever chemicals” on fetal health.

“We’re left without the information that we need to make good decisions,” says Jaime Schrabeck, a California nail salon owner and manicurist who’d been recruiting participants for a Niosh study about the reproductive health impacts of salon chemicals. “We are left to fend for ourselves,” she says, now that the cuts killed the study. “There is so much misinformation about the chemistry, because we don’t get that kind of training in beauty school.”

Niosh also spearheaded the research behind the Biden administration’s proposal for an OSHA rule protecting a wide range of workers from excessive heat. When OSHA held hearings this summer, business groups showed up to criticize the proposed rule, but Niosh scientists who did the research weren’t able to weigh in, because they remain on administrative leave while the agency tries to fire them. Niosh scientists working on a Pentagon-funded study of cancer cases among military aviators were similarly sidelined.

Since 2018, Niosh had one toxicologist, Jerald Ovesen in Cincinnati, overseeing updates to the national list of hazardous drugs that health-care workers should handle with precautions, from abacavir to zonisamide. Ovesen received a layoff notice in April and now works for a consulting firm. When he attended a conference of pharmacists in June, his fellow attendees were shocked to hear there was no toxicologist left at Niosh managing the list. “No one should have to go into work wondering if work is going to give them cancer in 10 years,” Ovesen says. “People are going to be in the dark.”

Rebecca Tsai.

Photographer: Amy Lynn Powell for Bloomberg Businessweek

Another Cincinnati employee who received a layoff notice in April was Rebecca Tsai, Niosh’s point person for an interagency effort to prevent lead poisoning among children. (A key way kids get exposed is when parents inadvertently bring home lead particles from work.) Until her team was terminated, Tsai had been working with state agencies to identify workplaces with heightened lead exposure, such as construction sites, battery plants and gun ranges. The work seemed to fit neatly into Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, she says. “If they’re concerned about fluoride in water, then they should really be concerned about lead.”

Even mission-critical responsibilities with broad bipartisan support are now faltering, threatened or both. The Sept. 11 health center’s steering and advisory committees—including panels of survivors and medical experts—haven’t met since Trump took office. The agency was supposed to take action back in March on petitions, including from the New York City Fire Department, that seek to add new cardiac and autoimmune conditions as ways that responders and survivors can qualify for treatment. The health center has yet to address those.

Pittsburgh PPE staffers, even after getting their jobs back, say they were hindered by vendor contracts having been axed. Now they have their chemicals back, but not the still-sidelined colleagues on other teams whom they’ve relied on to lend expertise and conduct laboratory experiments on new threats. Instead of periodically visiting manufacturers in person to confirm their processes are aboveboard, they’re conducting “virtual audits” via teleconference because they don’t have permission to travel. And the PPE team is still, in a sense, on borrowed time: Trump’s budget proposal urges Congress to eliminate the certification program as part of an effort to “streamline the bureaucracy.” If that happens “it’s Russian roulette,” says John Henshaw, who ran OSHA under President George W. Bush. Henshaw, a Republican, says he shares the goal of rooting out government waste but has told peers in the Trump administration they overdid it with Niosh. “The chainsaw had too big of a blade,” he says.

Following through with abolishing the PPE team “would be a catastrophic mistake,” says Eric Axel, executive director of the American Medical Manufacturers Association. “What differentiates the US marketplace is having these strict and rigorous protocols in place,” he says. Already, Axel says, the PPE lab is depleted, with fewer staff and narrower ambitions, and it’s pulling back from the kinds of research, education and engagement with companies that used to accompany its certification program. “It’s a micro version of what it used to be.”

The harms will take time for most people to notice, says Robert Harrison, who directs the occupational illness investigation program at the California Department of Public Health. Harrison, a senior attending physician and clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco, says he regularly draws on Niosh research to help his patients. The cuts, he says, mean new threats will go unnoticed, causations will go unrecognized, and hazards will go unaddressed. “It’s one of those ‘You’re not going to miss me until I’m gone’ situations.”

Andrew Huddleston, advocacy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, puts things more colorfully. “The federal workforce is a lot like the plumbing in your house,” says Huddleston, whose union represents much of Niosh’s staff. “The work is often invisible until those systems break down,” he says. “When you see water start pouring out from under your kitchen sink, or shit piling up in your toilet.”

Of course, Niosh isn’t alone. This year, Trump has upended civil service protections that had endured under presidents of both parties for half a century. The White House has announced mass firings across the federal workforce, moved to strip employee benefits and job security, and tried to eliminate collective bargaining for roughly 1 million federal employees. Trump has already gone far beyond President Ronald Reagan’s landmark destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, says Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin. “It’s like Patco times a thousand.”

The Labor Department has nixed its own workers’ child-care and mental health-care benefits. The Department of Education has been trying to end its nondiscrimination protections for pregnant employees, citing a Trump executive order on “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” Paula Soldner, who leads the food inspectors union at the Department of Agriculture, says she now tries to get her meat butchered by people she knows personally, because the agency’s oversight of meatpacking plants has been compromised by this year’s buyouts. (The Education Department has said it’s complying with the law; a spokesperson for the USDA said that the agency has enough inspectors to oversee meatpacking plants and that it’s hiring to fill its vacancies; the Labor Department didn’t respond to inquiries.)

David Michaels, President Barack Obama’s head of OSHA, says the cumulative effect is to hobble key government functions such as Niosh’s in the short term while also driving a generation of bright idealists away from public service. “For decades, I told my students that a career in the federal government is very desirable,” says Michaels, a public-health professor at George Washington University. The pay has always been worse than the private sector, he says, but government employment offered both stability and the chance to do good work you could be proud of. “Now, I certainly can’t tell my students that.”

Federal workers have been grasping for leverage where they can find it. For months fired workers have been haunting the halls of Congress on Tuesdays, sometimes with their kids in tow, flagging down senators in the hallways or occupying their offices until cops tell them to move along. The US Supreme Court in July cleared the way for a slew of firings at HHS and other agencies, lifting a lower court’s injunction in California. For the time being, Niosh staff are protected by a different injunction secured by state attorneys general, but that may not last long. One of the scientists on administrative leave, who’s undergoing treatment for breast cancer, says she expects to lose her job and her insurance if the legal fight ends up at the Supreme Court, as seems likely.

Kennedy kicked off a fresh firestorm in August by firing his handpicked CDC director, who clashed with him over vaccines. Those still on the job have heard little about their supposed relocation to Kennedy’s planned agency, AHA. The Senate Appropriations Committee voted in July to preserve full funding for Niosh, and this month its House counterpart proposed cutting the agency’s budget by 14%, a better deal than 80%. But although Congress is supposed to pass an annual budget by the end of September, stopgap measures or shutdowns could mean months of limbo instead. And Vought has said that he sees congressional budgets as a ceiling for what agencies can spend, not a floor for what they must spend, and that the White House may ask lawmakers to claw back more already appropriated funds, as they recently did with NPR and PBS.

In the meantime, the pipeline for workplace safety research has burst. More than 1 in 6 Niosh staffers has already put in their resignation this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Older experts are retiring earlier than they’d planned, and younger ones are weighing other career paths. “We’ve already lost a generation of talent,” says Lawrence Sloan, CEO of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, which represents health and safety professionals and scientists. “A lot of that sort of research is going to leave the US.”

Some midcareer scientists are moving on to other jobs for the sake of their financial security, including marketing safety equipment and delivering mail. “I have to keep making moves,” says Nicholas Coombs, a former public-health scientist for Niosh who’s relocating from Atlanta to Moscow, Idaho, for a university job. After getting the layoff notice, he started pursuing gigs far afield from safety research, but he says he misses it. “Losing the job sucked, but not getting to do this work anymore is gutting.”

Kara Fluharty.

Photographer: Kristian Thacker for Bloomberg Businessweek

Even if the courts restore their jobs, some employees targeted for termination are wary about sticking around under the leaders that tried to fire them. (One longtime employee compares it to being forced back together with an ex.) Kara Fluharty, a co-author of several papers about the once-common butter-flavoring chemical that Niosh exposed as the cause of a severe, irreversible respiratory disease known as popcorn lung, says she’s considering becoming a full-time bird-watcher. Another scientist says she made a decade-plus of career decisions, including getting a doctorate, because of what she thought the government wanted her to do; now she’s reassessing. “I felt like I was serving my country, and now to just be tossed out …” she says, trailing off. “I don’t know where to go from here.”

Tim Bauerle.

Photographer: Margaret Albaugh for Bloomberg Businessweek

Those still on the payroll are doing what they can to cope, including, for those allowed to, their jobs. As he hustled to wrap up what research he could this spring, scientist Tim Bauerle got an arm tattoo, quoting a letter left behind by a Tennessee coal miner who died of oxygen deprivation after a preventable mine explosion. It reads, “Oh God, for one more breath.”

To contact the author of this story:
Josh Eidelson in San Francisco at jeidelson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Jeff Muskus at jmuskus@bloomberg.net

Jim Aley

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