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RFK Jr.'s Friday night massacre aims to Give Americans Black Lung Again [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-04
The mission to “Make America Healthy Again” may soon be derailed by soaring incidents of cancer, rare diseases, and workplace tragedy.
Since 1970, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has inspected dangerous work sites, investigated mysterious illnesses, approved respirators, published guides to handling hazardous materials, and sought ways to protect Americans from fatal diseases contracted on the job.
On Friday evening, what remained of the agency was wiped out via outdated form letter sent by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The letter informed NIOSH employees that they were on immediate administrative leave until their official termination on July 2nd. It was a final Reduction in Force memo for the agency, which had most of its 1500-person staff put on leave at the beginning of April, when Kennedy fired 10,000 workers from HHS.
“Hilariously, they said we lose access to the building on April 1, even though I've been in the office since then,” one NIOSH worker and union leader told me. “They couldn't even be bothered to proofread after copy-pasting from the last round of letters.”
NIOSH’s mass layoff event in April was greeted with outrage on both sides of the aisle. Legislators from New York were angered over the gutting of staff working on the World Trade Center Health Program, which assisted first responders and survivors of 9/11, and lawmakers from Appalachian states raged over the destruction of the Respiratory Disease Division, key to preventing black lung among mineworkers.
More than 100 lawmakers signed a letter to the HHS secretary days after the firings were announced. In response, Kennedy restored employees from some of the more sensitive programs from their administrative leave, only to fire nearly all of those departments again soon thereafter.
United Mineworkers Association President Cecil E. Roberts raged against those firings in a statement issued early Saturday morning, which I’ve excerpted below:
“Let me be clear: this is not just an attack on jobs. This is an attack on the very foundation of worker safety in the United States of America,” Roberts said. “This division is responsible for developing life-saving coal dust and silica monitors. It runs the miner X-ray surveillance program. It oversees MSHA’s Part 90 program — a program that literally exists to save the lungs and lives of American coal miners… Who is going to monitor dust levels in our mines? Who will ensure the next generation of miners doesn’t end up with the same black lungs as their fathers and grandfathers?”
Among the newly terminated are those employees who worked for the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer. After CBS reported on those firings on Friday night, HHS pushed back, claiming that no CDC employee had been laid off and that the firefighter health and safety programs would remain a “top priority” for the agency.
A source who worked for the firefighter registry disputed each of HHS’s claims, confirming that they’d been fired on Friday evening and noting that the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer had already been closed to new applicants. The agency’s website affirmed that the program was taken offline.
Sorry, firefighters with cancer, RFK Jr. is uninterested in your health
The firefighter registry’s closing was emblematic of what’s happened both at NIOSH and more broadly across many government agencies. Shortly after President Trump was inaugurated, he issued a travel ban and communications blackout on all CDC employees, which meant “no presentations, no conferences, no field research, no scientific and technical working groups, no collaborations with external partners, and no publications,” as one source put it.
That was followed by a $1 limit on workers’ government credit cards, which made it impossible to purchase even basic office supplies. As a result, little work has gotten done over the first 100 days of the administration, and paired with the various “fork in the road” buyout offers, there had already been something of an exodus of employees.
These firings will also likely lead to lawsuits, though the very existence of the entities that defend workers is also in danger.
A NIOSH source also pointed out that HHS’s statement claimed that the agency had complied with “agreed-upon process” with the union; in reality, Kennedy ignored the AFGE’s letter requesting to bargain over the firings when they were first announced in April. At the time, HHS was operating under President Trump’s executive order stripping federal workers of their collective bargaining rights, a fiat that has since been blocked by a federal judge.
NOTE: This was originally published in my newsletter, Progress Report, where I report on the federal government, workers’ rights, elections, activism, and more. I also broadcast weekly live interviews with top authors, activists, lawmakers, and others making news.
I recently published scoops on compromised security at the Department of Defense, went deep with heroic labor activists in Utah, covered critical state legislation step-by-step, and broke a viral scoop about a ridiculous gag order at the Dept. of Interior.
It’s entirely reader-supported, but free to subscribe — and I’ll never sell your email address to spammers, politicians, or anybody else.
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