NIOSH layoffs
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When a firefighter dies in the line of duty, a small team of federal health workers is often called on to pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.
That’s what happened after two firefighters died in California in 2020 while searching for an elderly woman in a burning library. It happened in 2023 when a Navy firefighter died in Maryland after a floor collapsed in a burning home. And it happened last year in Georgia when a career battalion chief died after a semitrailer truck exploded.
But President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for conducting those reviews.
At least two-thirds of the employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within HHS, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or will be in June. These cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the team that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths, one of the laid-off investigators told ProPublica.
Most nonunionized NIOSH workers were given until the end of the day to clear out their desks. The layoffs were so abrupt, staff said, that lab animals were left without staff to care for them and had to be euthanized, and an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding and polluting the surrounding environment.
“It was pure chaos,” another NIOSH employee said.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-cuts-firefighter-deaths
