After 9 months of uncertainty, federal workplace safety agency NIOSH brings back workers at Spokane Research Lab

WASHINGTON – After being paid not to work for nine months, employees at a federal office in Spokane dedicated to workplace safety were reinstated on Jan. 13, but their research faces challenges and uncertainty after many left during the long layoff period.

The Spokane Research Lab of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, houses two divisions: one focused on safety for hard-rock miners and the other on workers in the oil and gas industry, commercial fishing, wildland firefighting and other high-risk lines of work. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. terminated nearly all NIOSH employees in Spokane at the end of March 2025, and they were later placed on paid administrative leave. About nine months later, Kennedy reversed that decision with no explanation.

“I’m really glad to be back,” said Tristan Victoroff, a NIOSH epidemiologist and a union steward with the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 1916. “We’re grateful and hopeful. It just seems that everybody has never been more hopeful and more leery at the same time, because we are seeing what we’re left with – and we’re missing a lot of good people.”

Brad Seymour, another AFGE union steward and a research mining engineer, said roughly a quarter of staff at NIOSH’s Spokane Mining Research Division retired or left for other jobs since they were sent home last year. Victoroff estimated that the Western States Division – which works to improve safety for wildland firefighters, farmworkers, commercial fishery workers and those in the oil and gas industry – lost about half of its staff in that time, including the division’s director and deputy director. Both men spoke in their capacity as union stewards and emphasized that they were not speaking for NIOSH.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes NIOSH, sent a statement but did not answer questions about why Kennedy laid off the workers, why he reversed that move and how the department plans to handle research that was being done by employees who have since left NIOSH.

“Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, the nation’s critical public health functions remain intact and effective,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard said. “The Trump Administration is committed to protecting essential services – whether it’s supporting coal miners and firefighters through NIOSH, safeguarding public health through lead prevention, or researching and tracking the most prevalent communicable diseases. Enhancing the health and well-being of all Americans remains our top priority.”

On March 31, NIOSH employees in Spokane were notified that Kennedy had decided to terminate them as part of his agency’s “broader strategy to improve its efficiency and effectiveness to make America healthier,” and in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order in February that directed federal agencies to cut costs and established the now-defunct “Department of Government Efficiency Service” under the leadership of billionaire Elon Musk.

Contrary to Musk’s promise to cut the government’s spending by $1 trillion by the end of the year, the world’s richest man’s main accomplishment was eliminating lifesaving aid for some of the world’s poorest people – while federal spending actually increased in 2025, according to Treasury Department data. That is partly due to the administration’s handling of agencies like NIOSH.

“We were paid to stay home, which is unfortunate for the American taxpayer,” Seymour said. “That’s not a very good use of taxpayer money.”

Members of Congress from both parties have supported the NIOSH employees and called for the Trump administration to reinstate them. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, sent letters to Kennedy in April, pointing out that the Spokane Research Lab supported some of the same industries Trump has prioritized, and again in May after the secretary brought back some NIOSH employees in West Virginia.

“I have long supported the vital work of the NIOSH Lab in Spokane and strongly advocated for reinstating its employees,” Baumgartner said in a statement. “I’m pleased that the layoffs have been reversed and look forward to seeing the lab continue its outstanding contributions to worker safety and health.”

In May, Trump requested a roughly 80% cut to NIOSH funding from Congress, just $73.2 million to fund a scaled-back version of the agency that would not include the divisions in Spokane.

“It was such a drastic reduction that it would have broken NIOSH if they hadn’t brought the rest of NIOSH back,” Victoroff said. “By any measure, it would have fractured NIOSH in a very meaningful and historic way.”

The appropriations bill the House passed on Thursday, which the Senate is expected to pass before the end of January, includes $366.8 million for NIOSH, an increase from the previous year.

That legislation, negotiated by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, includes language that explicitly protects “the programs and activities located in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, and West Virginia as well as the staff in these locations in place on March 30, 2025.” In a statement, the senator said the nine-month work stoppage is “no way to govern” and is “deeply demoralizing to the dedicated professionals who have devoted their careers to helping protect workers through the critical research happening at NIOSH Spokane.”

“A hallmark of the Trump administration has been wasteful, pointless chaos – and their reckless job cuts at NIOSH are a prime example,” Murray said. “The Trump administration’s decision to decimate NIOSH never made any sense, and while I’m glad they finally relented and reversed these cuts, it’s clear that a tremendous amount of damage has already been done – from disrupted research to the loss of institutional knowledge that is not coming back.”

Jerry Poplin, former associate director for science in the Spokane Mining Research Division, spent nine years at NIOSH focused on miners’ health, chronic diseases and long-term exposure to hazardous chemicals and other risks in the industry. After he and his colleagues were notified that they were subject to a “reduction in force” and shouldn’t come to work starting April 1, they were effectively placed on administrative leave on June 1 while court challenges to Trump’s effort to cut the federal workforce proceeded.

With his supervisors’ permission, Poplin said, he did what he could to continue his research projects, especially those with external partners who needed support. The laid-off NIOSH employees in Spokane kept in touch, meeting in person or on video calls to discuss the chances of their jobs being reinstated.

But Poplin said that after six months of uncertainty, he missed the sense of purpose he got from work and decided to leave NIOSH. He is now the associate dean for research at the Joint School of Public Health at Old Dominion University and Norfolk State University in Virginia.

“The decision was objectively easy while emotionally difficult, because I really enjoyed what I was doing at NIOSH,” he said. “I’d say it’s going to take longer than anybody anticipates to restart the research that we were previously doing. It’s relatively easy to break something but far more difficult to build something worthwhile, so some research is going to be completely lost.”

During the nine-month limbo period, Poplin said, key employees were lost, important equipment was not maintained and NIOSH’s partners lost trust in working with the federal government. Victoroff said supervisors have told him they will not be permitted to hire freely to fill the now-vacant positions.

“We really only have a handful of scientific staff left in my division, and it does raise the question of what we’re going to be working on moving forward,” Victoroff said. “Obviously, there’s going to need to be a reassessment, and I don’t think anybody could really claim that we can just pick up where we left off.”

Seymour said people were enthusiastic about working in the Spokane office because they liked the jobs and the mission, but a lot of his younger colleagues left to work in the private sector, because they had the opportunity for promotion and to continue in their careers.

“It’s difficult to hire people for research positions anyway, because they start at a low salary compared to the mining industry,” he said. “A lot of people, they didn’t want to put up with the hassle of not knowing whether they were going to have a job tomorrow or not.”

Some people took other jobs while on administrative leave at NIOSH, after going through an ethics review to screen for conflicts of interest and getting permission from supervisors, Seymour said. Those who want to come back to NIOSH have been given time to put in their two-week notice at those other jobs.

Poplin said he trusts that his former colleagues in Spokane, whom he called “an exceptional group of people,” will find ways to get their research up and running to benefit the frontline workers and the sectors of the U.S. economy that rely on them. One takeaway from the saga is that NIOSH employees need to get better at explaining the importance of the often esoteric work they do, he said, but he added that high-level government officials also have a responsibility to understand what they’re dismantling before they take it apart.