For more than half a century, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), has worked to improve workplace safety and to study the effects on workers of exposures to toxins such as lead. Its teams of epidemiologists, occupational nurses, specialist doctors, toxins experts, and others do everything from going into pharmaceuticals production sites to monitor for dangerous levels of pharmaceutical dust, to making sure the ventilation at cannabis processing facilities is safe, to investigating fatalities and injuries at construction sites.

One of the NIOSH units monitors firefighters suffering from cancers caused by exposure to toxins; another, based out of Morgantown, West Virginia, studies respiratory diseases that coal miners are prone to. Still another works on the health risks faced by first responders at the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 attacks. It runs a lab that certifies respiratory equipment used by firefighters and coal miners. The agency also helps train nongovernment industrial hygienists to replicate some of the research NIOSH teams have been doing.

All of that is now threatened. The demolition of the agency was, industrial hygienist Hannah Echt told me, “Kind of like a big FU for everything.”

“A lot of us wanted to work in these jobs because we wanted a job in public service,” Echt added. “They’re not even saying ‘thank you,’ they’re saying ‘you’re done. Get a real job.’”

NIOSH is a congressionally created, and funded, agency, having been established as part of the larger Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. It has roughly 1,300 staff spread around the country, in offices in Washington, D.C.; Ohio; West Virginia; Alaska; Pennsylvania; Washington; Georgia and Colorado. Taken as a whole, despite the fact that the agency’s budget is only $363 million — which translates to a little over two dollars per year per U.S. worker — the agency’s employees do some of the most important public health and labor safety work in the country, carrying out, at the request both of employers and of employees and trade unions, evaluations, and then remediation, of potentially dangerous workplaces. The agency also does health monitoring of particularly at-risk categories of workers, such as firefighters and coal miners.

If any agency ought to have bipartisan support, it’s one that helps sick firefighters — several research projects in recent years have found that firefighters have a statistically more significant likelihood of developing cancer than does the population at large, though the exact numbers are somewhat hard to quantify — along with dying coal miners and first responders to domestic terror attacks. But, in Trump 2.0 that’s no longer the case.

HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved NIOSH from under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and placed it under the auspices of the newly created Administration for a Healthy America, where it was summarily dismembered. Three months into the Trump presidency, NIOSH’s staff — like so many other workers at public health, labor safety, consumer rights and environmental agencies — is facing a wholesale destruction of their jobs and institution, leaving a gaping hole in the country’s ability to ensure safe workplaces and increasing the likelihood of deadly workplace accidents, toxic exposures and chronic illnesses. These are the collateral consequences of the rush to roll back regulations and to free up American industry from the pesky costs of government oversight under Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

In fact, the antipathy toward agencies that work to protect the U.S.’s workers, especially those further down the income chain, is one of the most visible leitmotifs running through Trump 2.0. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, 1,400 out of 1,700 staffers were fired in an early April purge. DOGE has cancelled the leases for numerous regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and large-scale job cuts at the NLRB are likely. At the same time, OSHA’s ability to enforce new workplace standards and regulations looks to be in jeopardy. Well over three thousand staffers at the Food and Drug Administration are being fired; and 2,400 employees at the CDC are also being let go. The vast majority of staff at the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health have been canned. And the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice has been forced to fire most of its team.

And then, to pour salt into the wound, there’s the all-out assault on NIOSH. Somewhere in the region of 900 of the agency’s employees have been sent Reduction-in-Force (RIF) notices telling them to expect to be fired in June; this represents nearly 10 percent of the entire staffing cuts that have been foisted on the sprawling Department of Health & Human Services to date. The RIF letters were a combination of brutal and saccharine, announcing that because of a Reduction in Force their services would no longer be required, and then concluding, “Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this challenging time,” according to Echt. Administrators at the agency have already been put on administrative leave, so that even though they are still formally employed until the start of June, in reality they are already prohibited from doing any NIOSH work.

So extreme are the cuts that when one clicks on the agency’s website, a banner atop the front page declares, “Due to the reduction in force across NIOSH, no new health hazard evaluation requests can be accepted.”

None of this vandalism-like destruction, either at NIOSH or the other agencies, has been approved by Congress; and yet, the cuts are likely to stand simply because the GOP majority shows absolutely no interest in pushing back against them. Astoundingly, in the year 2025, the U.S. government is rolling back regulatory agencies that have existed, in some cases, for more than a century. And this rollback is occurring not because there is mass public support for it, but because Donald Trump’s inner circle is intent on smashing to smithereens any agency that protects the public’s health, its working conditions and its environment from the evermore predatory actions of the U.S.’s new oligarchy.

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