Trump Guts Agency Critical to Worker Safety as Temperatures Rise

Ronald Silver II was just three hours into his shift collecting trash for the city of Baltimore when he started feeling bad and unsteady on his feet. 

The city had been under an extended “code red” extreme heat alert, and he still hadn’t recovered from a grueling shift a few days earlier, when temperatures hit 95 degrees Fahrenheit. As the day wore on, both Silver and his co-worker developed blurry vision and felt so depleted they thought they were going to die. 

Silver continued working through bouts of cramping and pain in his chest and legs, even as temperatures reached 100 degrees and Baltimore’s high humidity made it feel even hotter. A little before 4 p.m., Silver fell face down in an alleyway, scraping his hands and elbows. He drifted in and out of consciousness as his co-worker, who was also feeling woozy, tried to help him up. His coworker somehow managed to lift Silver’s limp body into the truck, but became delirious from the exertion and had to stop working. Silver staggered from the truck to a resident’s door to ask for help, appearing disoriented and distressed, then collapsed, rallying only to ask the resident to douse him with water. 

By 5:05 p.m., half an hour after paramedics rushed Silver to the hospital, the 36-year-old father of five was dead. The state medical examiner said he died of hyperthermia, or overheating. 

Worker advocates have long fought to pass a national heat standard to ensure that no worker ever dies of heat stroke. A standard would require employers to take simple measures, like providing water, shade or a place to rest and cool down. It would also train workers to recognize signs of heat stress in themselves and others so they know what steps to take before it’s too late.

But President Donald Trump paused a proposed standard that had been years in the making on his first day in office as part of a directive to all executive departments and agencies to freeze rulemaking pending review by a Trump-assigned agency head. 

And now the administration plans to close 11 area offices of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, which issues regulations to protect workers from hazardous conditions like extreme heat. And at the beginning of the month, it started terminating the vast majority of workers at an obscure research agency that is vital to OSHA’s work: the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH. 

Roughly 1,300 employees work for NIOSH, long housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. Earlier this month, at least two-thirds of the staff received “reduction in force” notices, alerting them that their jobs would be terminated.

“NIOSH is a small agency that mostly nobody’s ever heard of, so it’s hard for them to get attention above the kind of fog of war that’s going on everywhere else,” said Jordan Barab, who served as OSHA deputy assistant secretary under President Barack Obama. 

NIOSH is the only federal agency mandated to produce research and recommendations to prevent work-related injury, illness and death.

The agency provides the scientific basis for all the health and safety regulations that protect America’s tens of millions of workers. It also issues guidelines for hazards that lack OSHA standards, including exposure to extreme heat.

Humidity amplifies the dangers of heat waves, interfering with the normal cooling processes in which perspiration evaporates to remove heat from the body. Climate change is making these extreme humid heat events more common, a problem highlighted by NIOSH’s authoritative guidelines on working in hot environments. 

The agency published its first recommendations for a heat standard in 1972, and they have been updated several times.

Brenda Jacklitsch, an occupational heat stress expert who received a reduction-in-force notice on April 1, led the most recent heat exposure recommendations, published in 2016. Because the document is filled with technical and scientific information, Jacklitsch and her colleagues had been working to make the most important information more accessible, in part by doing focus groups with English- and Spanish-speaking workers.

“Unfortunately, that work has now stopped,” she said. The gutting of the agency and elimination of so many dedicated public servants, she added, “is heartbreaking.”

And the OSHA-NIOSH Heat Safety Tool, an app that provides real-time data on “feels like” temperatures that’s been downloaded millions of times, just lost the NIOSH contractors who developed the app.

“I kept hearing that, ‘Oh, scientists aren’t going to get fired,’” Jacklitsch said. “Yet the majority of NIOSH can qualify as being called science-based positions, and we’re all gone.”

It’s unclear how CDC is going to deal with heat-related health issues during the coming summer, she said. “As far as I know, there’s not really anyone left.”

The cuts to NIOSH pose a dire threat to immigrant workers, particularly those in high-heat, high-risk jobs like agriculture, warehousing and construction, said Jessica Martinez, executive director of the nonprofit National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. “We will see more injuries, more heatstroke and more deaths. The workers who feed us, build for us and care for our families deserve protection, not abandonment.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said NIOSH and “its critical programs” will join the new Administration for a Healthy America, part of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, along with other agencies to improve coordination of health resources for low-income Americans.

The spokesperson did not respond to questions about how OSHA will be able to function without NIOSH’s research and training or whether the administration will reverse the terminations.

“It’s been a consistent pattern with this administration, where they say they want to make Americans healthy but then they act in the opposite direction of doing that,” said Tracey Woodruff, an expert on toxic chemicals who directs the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco.

“NIOSH is so important for protecting the very, very many people who have to work in industries where they are exposed to toxic chemicals,” Woodruff said. “By dismantling NIOSH, they’re going to remove the capacity to do the science that helps address toxic chemical exposures in the workplace.”

NIOSH has done globally influential work on the health effects of extreme heat exposure and heat-illness protection programs, said David Michaels, a professor at George Washington University School of Public Health and former OSHA director under Obama. 

“I’ve traveled around the world, and people say they always rely on the NIOSH recommended heat-exposure criteria documents,” Michaels said. The criteria for a recommended standard for occupational exposure to heat and hot environments, he said, “is the most important single document in protecting workers from heat and helping employers protect workers.”

Now, he added, “all that research will stop.”

Decimating Worker Research and the Expert Pipeline

NIOSH established offices and research laboratories from Alaska to West Virginia that specialize in understanding and minimizing the diverse threats workers face.

Agency staff and contractors at NIOSH’s National Personal Protective Technology Lab test and certify personal protective equipment, including the surgical gowns that protect doctors and nurses from blood-borne pathogens like Ebola and the respirators that ensure workers don’t inhale pesticides, fumes from oil and gas wells and other contaminants. The “N” in the N-95 masks that were in such high demand during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis stands for NIOSH.

As climate change aggravates air quality by fueling more wildfires, and accelerates the spread of infectious diseases, ensuring respirators work as intended will be increasingly important for everybody, experts say.

“The NIOSH program is the key to making sure that we have respirators that function well and are accessible,” said Michaels. “Without that, there’s a huge concern about counterfeit respirators.”

The National Personal Protective Technology Lab also had a physiology lab where it used “sweat mannequins” to study how PPE increases the heat burden for firefighters, miners and other workers. That program, heat experts fear, will also disappear.

Beyond the immediate risks to worker health and safety, experts worry about the fate of the 18 NIOSH-funded education and research centers across the country. 

By dismantling NIOSH, Barab said, the administration “is basically disrupting the entire pipeline of occupational safety and health professionals in the country.”

The agency-funded centers have trained thousands of doctors, nurses and technicians in occupational medicine, safety and health and hundreds of thousands through continuing education programs, said Mitchel Rosen, director of the Center for Public Health Workforce Development at Rutgers University, who has organized the annual scientific meetings for the New York-New Jersey center for the past 30 years. 

The centers also provide outreach training to employers and workers who are exposed to everything from extreme heat, wildfires and toxic chemicals to novel and re-emerging infectious diseases.

“It’s devastating for the field to lose an organization like NIOSH,” Rosen said. “Without the training and research they’re doing right now that protects people today, and the training of the future generations, it’s going to have a generational impact.”

Barab said it’s almost as if somebody arbitrarily determined there are two agencies for health and safety in the country and decided to get rid of one of them.

But Congress created NIOSH and OSHA as separate, independent agencies, with NIOSH providing objective scientific research for the regulations OSHA develops.

There’s been what Michaels called “a huge upwelling of support” for NIOSH from a large coalition of industry, labor, professional, educational and scientific organizations that recently urged Congress to restore NIOSH staff and funding.

“It is clear to union nurses that the goal of this administration and congressional Republicans is not to improve health, but to slash public resources and ultimately privatize the agencies created to serve all of us,” wrote National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, in a statement in response to news of impending mass layoffs. The union was one of more than 450 organizations that signed the letter in support of NIOSH.

The International Safety Equipment Association, an industry trade group that signed the letter, said the administration’s unprecedented cuts would dismantle the only federal laboratory responsible for certifying respirators used by more than 50 million American workers. 

“They would also cripple the agency that leads critical worker safety and health research—research that has saved thousands of lives and prevented billions of dollars in losses across U.S. industries,” the association said.

“The employer community greatly values NIOSH,” Michaels said. “No one supports cutting it.”

“Left to Fend for Themselves”

Four years before Ronald Silver died, the Maryland legislature passed a bill directing the state’s occupational safety and health agency to develop a heat-illness prevention standard, said Juanita Constible, a heat and climate expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

“But they dilly-dallied and produced a draft that was so terrible that advocate groups, including NRDC, said, ‘Go back to the drawing board,’” Constible said.

Finally, last fall, Maryland became the first state on the East Coast to pass a heat standard, requiring all workers to have access to water, shade and rest breaks when the heat index, or “feels like,” temperature exceeds 80 degrees.

“I’m worried about millions of American workers being left to fend for themselves in an environment that is not only getting hotter, but also less worker-friendly.”

— Juanita Constible, Natural Resources Defense Council

No worker should die of a heat-related illness, Constible said. “Heat deaths are preventable. We know how to keep people cool and safe.”

Without a federal heat standard, several states are trying to develop their own rules, Constible said. While that’s a good thing, she said, the states that have their own OSHA branch, like Maryland, get a lot of their funding from federal OSHA. So even if they move ahead with rulemaking, if they don’t have the budget to enforce those rules, it won’t do much good.

Then there are many states, particularly in the middle of the country and the Southeast, that don’t have state OSHA programs, and have very limited options for developing their own heat rules. 

“I’m worried about millions of American workers being left to fend for themselves in an environment that is not only getting hotter, but also less worker-friendly,” Constible said. 

A federal heat standard was making progress under the Biden administration, but with the current administration’s pause on regulations—and a new portal soliciting recommendations for regulations to kill—no one is optimistic that the standard will survive.

The legal requirements for rolling back regulations are the same as for issuing new ones or updating them, and include public notices and comment periods, said Michaels, the former OSHA administrator. 

“But the current administration is using everything in its power to go around those rules, like offering to exempt polluters from environmental rules,” he said. “As a result, many more people will be sickened or killed by pollution or workplace hazards.”

Extreme heat is among the most serious of those hazards. And the breadth of workers exposed to heat “is incredible,” said Rosen, with Rutgers University. Many indoor workers labor in facilities that aren’t air conditioned or don’t have the infrastructure to allow them to rest in a cooler area and have water to drink. 

It’s the job of occupational health and safety professionals to identify strategies to keep these workers safe, Rosen said. “We look at putting systems in place, putting controls in place, that create a healthy workplace so that workers can go home at the end of the day and be with their families.”

As things stand, he said, more workers like Ronald Silver will be seriously injured or die because they have no federal protections from the heat. 

“Having a standard is going to protect lives,” he said. “Not having a standard is going to put more people at risk of dying on the job.”