When a firefighter is killed on the job, the response has long included a small federal team tasked with reconstructing what went wrong and recommending changes to prevent the next death. That capacity has been sharply reduced. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the Trump administration moved to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for those reviews.
ProPublica reporter Mark Olalde found that at least two-thirds of the staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, known as NIOSH, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or would be by June. According to CNN, the reductions affected roughly 875 of about 1,000 workers at the agency. ProPublica reported that the cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the unit that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths.
NIOSH was created by Congress in 1970 to research worker safety and health. Its firefighter fatality investigations are requested by the fire department that suffered a death, and, as ProPublica noted, the findings are shared with the firefighter’s family and the resulting reports are published so other departments can adjust their procedures.
Investigations left unfinished
An investigator who was laid off told ProPublica that the fatality team was examining deaths at 20 fire departments when the notices arrived, and that those probes are now unlikely to be completed. The same investigator said the administration had already restricted the program shortly after the inauguration by barring the team from traveling, communicating with other agencies and publishing reports. ProPublica reported that the department later allowed several reports to be published, while others remain unfinished.
ProPublica reported that the layoffs were abrupt enough that lab animals were left without staff and had to be euthanized, and that an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding. According to the layoff notice quoted by ProPublica, staff were told their positions were cut because their duties were “either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.”
Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840, which represents agency employees, told ProPublica the cuts were “an attack on NIOSH employees and federal employees, but it is also an attack on American workers generally.”
A firefighter cancer study halted
ProPublica reported that the layoffs also affected the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer, a study of why firefighters develop certain cancers at higher rates than the general population. Congress unanimously passed the bill creating the registry in 2018, and President Donald Trump signed it into law during his first term. According to ProPublica, more than 23,000 firefighters had signed up since the registry launched in April 2023, with researchers aiming for 200,000 participants before the enrollment portal went offline.
Judith Graber, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and co-chair of the board advising the registry, told ProPublica the project is “the largest effort ever taken anywhere to understand cancer in firefighters” and cannot simply be restarted once its researchers are laid off. ProPublica also reported that the cuts disrupted a program providing health care to emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center attacks.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Government Efficiency responded to ProPublica’s request for comment, and a NIOSH spokesperson referred questions to HHS. The department said in a statement that programs required by law, including some focused on firefighter health, would continue to operate, but did not answer how those programs would run after their staffs were terminated.
A partial reversal
The reductions drew pushback from unions, firefighters and lawmakers. According to NPR, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a congressional hearing on May 14 that 328 NIOSH employees had been reinstated, including workers on coal miner and 9/11 health screenings. NBC News reported that the reinstatements included 15 employees at the World Trade Center Health Program.
NPR reported that NIOSH director John Howard told staff in an email that while he was glad some had received rescission letters, others had not. As of that reporting, HHS had not said whether it would restore the remaining terminated positions.
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