NIOSH Cuts A Matter Of Life Or Death For Workers, Scientist Says

Updated Wednesday April 16, 2025 at 9:45 a.m.

Two weeks ago, almost all the workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) offices in Morgantown woke up to notifications that they were out of a job. 

The cuts are part of a sweeping reduction in force at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as across the federal government in general. 

Reporter Chris Schulz sat down with one of the affected workers, Kyle Mandler, to talk about the cuts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Schulz: Can you tell me just a little bit about the work that NIOSH does and, more specifically, what you did as a pulmonary toxicologist? 

Mandler: NIOSH has a wide variety of responsibilities.Our mission is to generate data that can be used by regulatory bodies to improve worker safety. In practice, that means in Morgantown a lot of us were studying toxic exposures in the workplace — be it chemical or, in my case, I studied a lot of construction dust. There’s other people who study things like how to reduce slips and falls for roofers, or how jackhammer vibrations impact the neuromuscular function. 

Of course, we have other branches outside of Morgantown. There’s something like 1,200 total employees, but there were only maybe 250 in Morgantown. One of those close to home up in Pittsburgh, the Mine Safety Office, they researched ways to protect miners from all the many hazards that they face. We also have other, more public-facing roles. In mining protection, we have teams that go out and do black lung screening for free for miners all throughout coal country. We also run the 9/11 first responders health monitoring program, and there’s a firefighter cancer registry that we’re also responsible (for). That’s actually down right now. If you go to that website, it’s no longer functional. 

That’s really kind of scratching the surface of everything that we do. I would take a long time to get through everything that NIOSH is responsible for. We don’t make any regulations. We just provide recommendations and health hazard evaluations.

Schulz: What have you been working on for the past seven or eight years?

Mandler: My group is mostly focused on aerosols and hazards that construction workers might be facing in the context of the lung. So we’ve studied the effects of micronized copper treated lumber dust, 3D printing emissions and then a few others. But, most recently, we’ve been focused on engineered stone dust. Most of your listeners are probably familiar with engineered stone; they might even have some of these products in their kitchens. They’re used for countertops. They make a very attractive surface that’s nice and shiny and durable, and it’s a nice product. But these products tend to have very high crystalline silica contents. There’s currently an outbreak of silicosis in these workers, both in the United States and worldwide, and workers are dying because of their exposure. We were just trying to understand what about these materials makes them more dangerous than natural stones, things like that. We were still in the early stages, but now that work is stopped.

Schulz: Tell me about the, for lack of a better term, work stoppage. First of all, how did you find out about the offices being closed?

Mandler: I will back up a bit, because since January 20 we have essentially been in a freeze. We haven’t been able to spend money. We haven’t been able to travel. We haven’t been allowed to communicate with our outside partners. We haven’t been able to attend conferences or publish papers or things like that, although some of that was starting to soften up recently. But clearly it didn’t matter. 

As far as the events of this week actually started last Friday night, our union was notified that there were going to be layoffs. And in that email, I think it said there would be something like 864 or 874 layoffs. And I think that was just members of the bargaining unit, so people that were covered hypothetically under union protections. When I saw that email, I don’t know exactly how many people NIOSH employs, but I knew that 874 out of roughly 1,000 is a pretty large fraction. I kind of figured the writing was on the wall then. But we showed up Monday and had a normal day of work, relatively. I took my laptop home that night, I thought there might be some shenanigans going on. And about five in the morning, we got another notification that about 200 people in NIOSH would be cut. And again, we only had maybe 250. Then my personal notification came at around six in the morning in an email. 

Schulz: Are you willing or able to share with me, more or less, what was communicated? 

Mandler: I don’t know that we need to read through it, but it was certainly more professional than some of those early layoffs of the probationary employees. For your listeners, the probationary employees weren’t in trouble. They were just in their first year or two of service. That just means that they don’t have, ostensibly, some of the protections that we would have after that probationary period. 

The main email just said, “We regret to inform you that you’ll be affected by this reduction in force. Please find the attached memorandum.” And then it refers to an executive order from earlier this year that basically said that they were cutting large portions of the government that were inefficient. That’s what we got.

Schulz: You obviously disagree with the assertion that your office’s work is inefficient.

Mandler: Absolutely. There’s a few ways to quantify that. We could talk about the number of publications that we put out every year, etc. The whole of NIOSH’s budget is roughly $330 million. That’s a lot of money, I don’t disagree. I will tell you that we take spending taxpayer money very seriously. If people understood the kind of hoops we have to jump through and the layers of oversight that we have to navigate to spend money, I think people would understand that we’re not wasting it. That $330 million comes out to about $1 per person, or $2 and change per working adult in the United States. In 2022, workplace injuries and deaths cost about $167 billion, so if our work reduces that number by 1% we’ve more than paid for ourselves. 

So cutting us — And, indeed, NIOSH no longer exists. There are a handful of employees still there, but they’re just there to shut the building down and sell the equipment. It’s a shell. If we put even a tiny dent in that number, and I think we put more than a dent in it. We paid for ourselves. So cutting us is kind of the definition of penny wise and pound foolish.

Schulz: What will be the impact of these closures as you understand it?

Mandler: To put it crudely, the impact will be dead workers. I’ve sat and listened to men younger than me talk about how they feel like they’re drowning in their own lungs. Those men won’t live long enough to see their children grow up.

If we leave this kind of research and regulation to private industry, it won’t happen. There’s a lot of talk of running the government like a business. Not to get too political about it, but businesses are in the business of business. They’re not in the business, necessarily, of protecting workers. And if it’s cheaper to expose a worker to a dangerous level of silica dust, for example, then they’ll do it. So we are all that stands in between the American worker and those types of injuries.

Schulz: Just from what you said, you care very deeply about the work that you do. Talk to me a little bit about how these last couple of days, since you got the notification, have been for you emotionally.

Mandler: It’s still very raw. I have the pleasure of working with a lot of people who do care deeply about the work that we do. Most of us could probably be making more money in the private sector. We worked at NIOSH because we believe in what we do and, until this week, is kind of a more stable position than an industry job that can come and go very easily.

So I haven’t slept well in several months. We all knew that something like this was possible. I don’t think anyone really expected a wholesale execution of the entire institution. I don’t think we believed that someone could be careless enough to even go after like the 9/11 first responder group or the firefighter group or things like that.

So surprise and shock was kind of the first emotion. Last month there was notification that we would be moved out of the CDC and into the new ‘Make America Healthy Again,’ or Administration for Healthy America. In that announcement, they talked about streamlining HR and admin and things like that. Obviously, we would be sad to see our HR and its people impacted. And we expected maybe some scientists would be forced into early retirement, or otherwise cut. But it was quite shocking to see an institution that was established by Congress 50 years ago and is congressionally mandated — even the research component is part of that congressional mandate — we were surprised that it could be axed so carelessly. 

Schulz: You mentioned a union earlier. Have you remained in contact with your co-workers and your colleagues? What is generally the feeling at the moment, amongst your colleagues?

Mandler: Most of us, or most of the scientists, are covered under the AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees) bargaining unit. I’m a member, there were a lot more members. In recent weeks I haven’t really heard much from the union yet. I’ve been kind of waiting. I’m hoping that they’re going to start filing lawsuits and such, but haven’t really heard much.

As far as my colleagues and I, we’ve been trying to get our stories out through social media and other ways. We’ve certainly been trying to contact our representatives for what that’s worth. I’ve been speaking with other journalists. This is the first kind of long form interview that I’ve given. But I hope that we can move the needle and maybe convince the higher powers that we need to be reinstated. But I’m not hopeful. Hopeful, but I don’t have high expectations.

Schulz: In a perfect scenario, if I understand you, then you would like to see the full reinstatement of NIOSH.

Mandler: Yeah, and nothing less. To only bring back the most politically expedient groups or something would be unacceptable. We need to be fully reinstated and allowed to do the work. We work for everyone, regardless of party. Our kind of institutional attitude at NIOSH is to just put our heads down and do the work. We had expected that enough people would have our back that we would never run into this situation. But here we are.

Schulz: Something that I’ve heard from other people is just how paralyzing this is both professionally and personally. What have you had to put on hold? 

Mandler: We were technically put on what’s called administrative leave. So it’s basically leave with pay for 60 days. So June 2, we’ll stop being paid, and our health insurance benefits will go away. I have a child coming next month, and as you can imagine, that’s put a lot of stress on me.

Everyone is now kind of scrambling to try and figure out what the next step is. Like I said, I’m hopeful that we’ll get reinstated, but we’re all putting resumes out and putting out contacts. Unfortunately, now these cuts weren’t limited to NIOSH. There’s tens of thousands of scientists now out of work, and there’s not nearly that many open job positions for us. And in the social media trenches I’ve seen a lot of people say, “Oh, well, just learn to code,” I guess as a reference to miners or pipeliners that were laid off last year.

Schulz: Software developers are also getting laid off.

Mandler: Software developers [are] also getting laid off. I will point out, a lot of us do know how to code as part of our job. But, and I will reiterate, that we worked for those miners and pipeliners. So it’s especially hurtful to hear things like that. But you have to get a thick skin when hearing that kind of thing. We’re all kind of left in limbo, and it’s very distressing.

**Editor’s Note: This story was updated to correct the budget of NIOSH stated in the interview. Kyle Mandler correctly stated the agency’s budget is roughly $330 million, which was incorrectly transcribed as $30 million in an earlier version of this story.