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,........

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