The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is not a government agency with a high public profile. Yet its activities are essential to protecting the health and safety of workers throughout the country.
NIOSH investigates occupational hazards, providing regulators and lawmakers with the crucial research necessary to make workplaces safer.
As the AFL-CIO puts it: “This highly efficient agency operates on a relatively small budget of $363 million yet has an enormous lifesaving impact for America’s workers and industries.”
The Trump Administration plans to slash its annual budget from $366 million last year to only $73 million.
That’s according to a recent report by Christopher Shaw in the August/September 2025 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen.
Recent staffing cuts at NIOSH have undermined the agency’s ability to protect workers from dangers on the job. Since Trump’s inauguration, over 80 percent of NIOSH staff have had their positions eliminated. President Richard M. Nixon established NIOSH when he signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.
Such landmark laws of the 1960s and 1970s made American workers safer. Over the past half-century, NIOSH has played a fundamental role in federal efforts to protect workers. The agency employs chemists, engineers, epidemiologists, industrial hygienists, public health experts, toxicologists, and other highly skilled researchers.
Micah Niemeier-Walsh represents current NIOSH employees as vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3840.
“NIOSH has been relatively uncontroversial up to this point,” she observes. “There was bipartisan support because there was an understanding of the fact that workers should not be getting sick or dying on the job. We don’t need a smaller, weaker NIOSH.”
Coal mining is a notoriously dangerous industry. The research of NIOSH guards against such hazards of mining as exposure to toxic dust, fires and explosions, collapsing walls at surface mines, and buckling roofs in underground mines.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), which oversees working conditions in the mining industry, relies on NIOSH for guidance on how to remedy current hazards in the industry and for information on emerging threats that demand future attention. The role of NIOSH in promoting worker health and safety can be seen in the push to address a troubling recent increase in black lung disease among coal miners.
Prior to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, black lung was the largely unaddressed and silent killer of hundreds of thousands of American miners. Black lung disease is caused by airborne coal mine dust that injures lungs, impairing the ability to breathe. By establishing the first dust exposure limits for miners, the 1969 coal mine safety law reduced the number of workers who fall prey to this deadly disease.
The prevalence of black lung disease among miners with more than twenty-five years of experience working underground fell from over 30 percent in the mid-1970s to around five percent by the late 1990s.
Shaw reports that after decades of progress, in the early 2000s NIOSH researchers analyzing radiographs of the lungs of coal miners observed an uptick in black lung in certain parts of the Appalachian coalfields.
This rebound in the prevalence of black lung disease led NIOSH to establish mobile examination units in these areas that allowed for more in-depth study of this troubling development.
This investigation led the researchers to conclude that there was a “need for improved dust control measures,” observing that “widely available dust control technologies should entirely protect miners from developing” black lung disease. Higher exposure to the silica in rock dust drove the rising rates of black lung disease.
More powerful equipment has increased the cost efficiency of mining both coal and the rock that surrounds it simultaneously and then separating out the rock afterwards. As a result, miners have been breathing more silica – a known human carcinogen – especially in central Appalachian mines with thin coal seams. In response to the increase in silica-caused black lung disease, Joseph A. Main, assistant secretary for MSHA during the Obama Administration, initiated regulatory steps to reduce silica exposure in coal mines.
Following the 2016 election of President Donald J. Trump, Main was replaced by former coal mining executive David G. Zatezalo. Efforts to reduce silica exposure did not advance during Zatezalo’s tenure at MSHA.
Meanwhile, NIOSH researchers continued to pursue the matter, and in 2018 published a study in the American Journal of Public Health that revealed that ten percent of miners with over twenty-five years of work experience had black lung.
This rate was elevated in central Appalachia, Shaw reports.
“We haven’t seen this rate of black lung since before the early ’90s,” said Cara Halldin, an epidemiologist at NIOSH.
Following the election of President Joseph R. Biden, new leadership took the reins at MSHA and secured a rule to reduce the exposure of coal miners to silica. The future of this rule remains uncertain, however, because the mining industry is challenging it in the courts and the Trump Administration has paused enforcement.
“We will not stop fighting to ensure that mine workers are protected from silica exposure,” pledged Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
“Every day this rule is delayed is another day that miners are exposed to the deadly dust that causes the worst forms of black lung – an incurable disease that this rule will help to prevent.” Despite this setback, the development of the silica rule demonstrates how NIOSH aids government regulators who seek to mitigate dangers in the workplace. Such efforts recently became more difficult following staff reductions at NIOSH that fractured and weakened the agency.
In April, employment at NIOSH was cut by approximately 90 percent. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) protested that eliminating over 1,000 employees “could impact vital health programs that are important to many West Virginians, especially our coal miners.”
In response to these staffing cuts, Senator Capito spoke to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who oversees NIOSH, and put him in touch with Roberts. The union leader emphasized the UMWA’s support for NIOSH in a telephone conversation with Kennedy.
“I think she’s [Capito] worked hard on this,” Roberts added. Political pressure from Republican members of Congress and a successful class action lawsuit led to the reinstatement of 300 NIOSH employees in May, including the division that studies the respiratory health of miners. Still, NIOSH offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Spokane, Washington, that conduct research on preventing illnesses, injury, and death in the mining industry were effectively shuttered in July.
[For the complete story, get your copy of the 40-page print edition of the Capitol Hill Citizen at capitolhillcitizen.com.’