As Trump administration aims to boost mining, drilling and fishing, Spokane office dedicated to workers' safety remains in jeopardy

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Jun. 7—WASHINGTON — Among the more than 150 executive actions President Donald Trump has taken since assuming office in January are orders that aim to boost oil and gas drilling, mining and commercial fishing in the United States.
But in response to another one of those executive orders, which created the "Department of Government Efficiency" and directed federal agencies to cut costs, the Department of Health and Human Services has effectively shuttered a Spokane facility that for decades has helped prevent harm to workers in those same high-risk industries.
On March 31, employees at the Spokane Research Lab of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, were notified that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had decided to terminate them in accordance with Trump's order and as part of his agency's "broader strategy to improve its efficiency and effectiveness to make America healthier."
Tristan Victoroff, an epidemiologist in NIOSH's Western States Division, said he and his colleagues thought they might escape the Trump administration's sweeping effort to slash the federal workforce because their work supports enterprises the president says he wants to grow.
"The industries that we work in, particularly with the mining program and the Western States Division — oil and gas, wildland firefighting, commercial fishing, mining — our mission does support those workers," said Victoroff, a union steward with the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1916. "We had considered ourselves to be in line with the administration's priorities, and so it really did come as a surprise when they essentially eliminated NIOSH."
Union members in Spokane were notified on May 2 that they had been placed on paid administrative leave and their jobs would be eliminated on July 2. That termination is temporarily on hold after courts in California ruled later in May that the Trump's administration's mass firing of federal workers likely violated the Constitution.
Facing a separate lawsuit from a West Virginia coal miner and backlash from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Kennedy reinstated about 300 of the 900 fired NIOSH employees in May. That move didn't officially spare any workers in Spokane, but researchers in NIOSH's Spokane Mining Research Division said they were told by their supervisors to return to work on an as-needed basis to wind down projects while technically remaining on leave.
"We're kind of in an in-between," said Casey Stazick, a union steward and materials engineer in the Spokane Mining Research Division. "We got our termination notices that said we're put on administrative leave unless told otherwise by a supervisor. Then, right around the same time, there was also an order that came down saying that we were critical employees, even though we're still getting fired."
Victoroff said his colleagues in the Western States Division all remain on administrative leave and at risk of losing their jobs, pending the outcome of the lawsuit filed by AFGE and other organizations. After the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on May 30 upheld a lower court's injunction that blocked the mass firing, the Trump administration immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, which could either rule on the case or let the lower court's ruling stand.
The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, didn't respond to questions from The Spokesman-Review about the rationale for the termination or any plans to rescind it. In response to an earlier inquiry, HHS said on May 22 that Kennedy "has been working hard to ensure that the critical functions under NIOSH remain intact" and that "ensuring the health and safety of our workforce remains a top priority for the Department."
In the May 2 emails, reviewed by The Spokesman-Review, NIOSH employees were told their termination "does not reflect directly on your service, performance, or conduct" and was happening because "your duties have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency."
Contrary to that explanation, documents and emails obtained by The Spokesman-Review show that Kennedy eliminated entire divisions of NIOSH, leaving virtually no one to focus on safety for hard-rock miners, oil and gas workers, commercial fishermen, farmworkers or wildland firefighters. That approach seems to have enabled the department to sidestep a federal law that requires an agency to define a "competitive area" subject to downsizing and gives priority to military veterans and those with longer tenure.
Most of the NIOSH jobs that Kennedy restored are based in West Virginia and Ohio, two states dominated by Republicans in Congress, and focus on high-profile programs including screening for black lung disease in coal miners and monitoring the health of firefighters who responded to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Brendan Demich, a union steward with AFGE Local 1916 and an engineer at NIOSH's facility in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said the department seems to have restored only a limited number of jobs that have drawn attention from the public, labor unions and Congress.
Kennedy announced in March that he would slash his department's workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 and combine multiple agencies under a new "Administration for a Healthy America." In a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday, HHS employees who lost their jobs allege the department knew it was using "hopelessly error-ridden" data to carry out the mass termination in March.
In a court filing on Monday, lawyers for HHS said the department had complied with a West Virginia judge's order to restore jobs at a NIOSH office in Morgantown, West Virginia, but an attorney representing the miner who brought the case said those employees haven't been given the tools they need to do their jobs. The West Virginia case does not apply to employees in the Spokane facility.
A report released on Monday by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., points out that NIOSH's current annual budget of $362.8 million represents just 0.2% of the discretionary part of the HHS budget. That's about 0.005% of the total federal budget, and NIOSH research has saved about $1 billion each year, according to the senator's report.
"The Trump administration's unfathomable decision to gut NIOSH and fire nearly every person at the Spokane Research Lab is a devastating and shortsighted move that puts workers everywhere at risk," Murray said in a statement that accompanied the report. "These thoughtless firings don't just risk Americans' health and safety in the workplace today, but threaten decades of progress toward preventing workplace hazards. Researchers in Spokane who have dedicated their careers to protecting workers across the country are being kicked to the curb because Donald Trump and his conspiracy theorist Health Secretary don't have a clue what NIOSH does and don't care to learn."
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., also voiced support for the Spokane researchers in a statement on Thursday.
"The dedicated team at NIOSH's Spokane facility conducts research that protects miners and other Americans with dangerous jobs," Cantwell said. "Closing NIOSH will mean more blue-collar workers suffering debilitating diseases from chemical exposure or dying in accidents. We should be increasing the Spokane Research Lab's budget to fund more innovation and safety, not shutting them down."
Trump's budget request to Congress, released May 30, includes $73.2 million for NIOSH — about 80% lower than the current fiscal year — including $66.5 million for mining research, $5.5 million for the agency's national cancer registry for firefighters and $1.2 million for mesothelioma research.
According to an email to NIOSH employees from the agency's director, obtained by The Spokesman-Review, Trump's request doesn't include funding for the Western States Division in Spokane.
Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said in a brief interview on Wednesday that ensuring safety for miners and oil and gas workers is "incredibly important" and emphasized that the president's budget request is only a suggestion. It will ultimately be Congress, he said, that decides how much funding NIOSH gets.
"These are things that were done by the DOGE people, and they were people who didn't have the same experience of dealing with the overall budget as we do up here," Risch said, noting that employees at the Department of Government Efficiency have admitted that they have made mistakes.
"When we sat down with the DOGE guys, they said, 'Look, we were given a job. We went and did this job. We understand you guys are experts on this. When we're done, it's going to be up to you,'" Risch said. "What we're going to do is take a healthy look at what these jobs entail. It's going to be looked at seriously and responsibly through the appropriations process."
Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has been less patient with Kennedy and DOGE, which was spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk before his public falling-out with Trump last week. In an interview on Wednesday, the Washington senator said she has repeatedly tried and failed to reach the HHS secretary's team, joking that they must have also fired everyone who answered the phones.
"We are looking at all the options, obviously, for next year," Murray said. "Writing our appropriations bills, looking at language, working in a bipartisan way, to make sure that funds that we, Congress, decide are appropriated will actually have to be implemented by the administration."
The Spokane Research Lab also has support in the House from Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican who has written two letters calling on Kennedy to reconsider the termination of its employees and visited the facility on Tuesday. Baumgartner's office didn't say whether he had received a response to either letter from the HHS secretary.
The Spokane facility's nationwide reach has earned it support from other influential Republicans in Congress, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota.
In a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on March 20, Rounds told Kennedy that terminating NIOSH jobs in Spokane had resulted in the loss of a $1.2 million mine safety grant to the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, which also relies on NIOSH for "critical technical support."
"We need to protect our miners," Kennedy replied, pledging to work with Rounds' office. "We need to protect them because they are the future of our country."
In a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Murkowski asked Trump's nominee to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — a regulatory agency that relies on NIOSH research — how he would do his job without data from NIOSH. The nominee, David Keeling, replied that it would be difficult, but he would consider replacing NIOSH with "private entities."
Asked why she thinks the Trump administration eliminated the NIOSH jobs, Murkowski told The Spokesman-Review on Thursday, "They were looking for cuts, and as we've seen in many departments, it seems somewhat indiscriminate and arbitrary."
"I think what we're working through still is some of the DOGE recommendations, where you're not fully appreciating the role and the function of many of these federal employees," she said. "My hope is that they're going to be actually looking at this now and realizing we need this information."
Murkowski said she has stressed to Kennedy how important NIOSH is for Alaska's commercial fisheries. Another concern, she said, is that valuable researchers could choose to leave public service while their jobs are in limbo.
"When you are sending the signal to that federal employee that maybe what you've been doing is not what we want to continue, people are making their own determinations and leaving, and now we've got all these vacancies," Murkowski said. "I think you're going to see a resettling. I just don't know when."
After earning an engineering degree at the Colorado School of Mines, Stazick worked in the private sector before she took a job with NIOSH at the Spokane Research Laboratory in 2020. She knew it would mean taking a pay cut but liked working to improve workers' safety, not just a company's bottom line.
"It was a really big incentive for me to go and take a big pay cut and go into the public sector," said Stazick, 27. "With this engineering degree that I could be using to make someone a bunch of money, it just felt nice that the work I was doing was affecting people's lives and safety."
NIOSH named Stazick one of its "rising stars" in 2022, and she developed her expertise in the corrosion of metal support structures for underground mines. She worked with miners to replace bolts that were corroding within six months — causing roof failures — with more durable materials.
"It's just upsetting," she said of the mass layoffs. "I'm at a career transition point again. I had found something I was really passionate about. So, yeah, the whole thing has been upsetting."
Stazick's colleague Brad Seymour, another mining engineer and union steward, is at the other end of his career. When he started at the Spokane facility in 1986, it was run by the now-defunct U.S. Bureau of Mines. He planned to work for about one more year, to make it an even 40.
"The thing that's discouraging about it is that I don't think it was discussed well within the leadership," Seymour said of the mass firing. "So it came as a shock to everybody. And because of that, the cuts were not handled in a very thoughtful manner."
Seymour has dedicated his career to helping miners prevent collapses and "rock bursts" caused by the extreme pressure in deep underground mines. That's in the interest of mining companies, but he said the engineers working for companies don't have the time or the incentives to do the kind of research that happens at NIOSH, which benefits the whole industry.
Coeur d'Alene-based Hecla Mining was forced to close its Lucky Friday Mine in Mullan for more than a year and spend over $30 million in improvements after accidents killed two miners and injured seven more in 2011. A spokesman for Hecla declined to comment on NIOSH research.
Early in his career, Seymour worked to improve cemented backfill methods — where miners fill underground voids with mill tailings and other material to prevent cave-ins — at the Cannon Mine in Wenatchee. Those improvements, he said, were adopted by mining companies around the world and helped fuel a gold-mining boom in Nevada in the 1990s.
Just like those benefits to the mining industry, the negative effects of ending NIOSH research could take years to be borne out, the workers in Spokane warned. Art Miller, who retired from the Spokane Mining Research Division at the end of 2020, started his career by working to reduce diesel emissions that were harming miners deep underground, then the government paid for him to go back to school and earn a doctorate in particle science.
He became the resident expert in silica dust, the airborne form of the mineral also called quartz, which is abundant in hard-rock mines. When inhaled, it can cause silicosis, an incurable lung disease that leads to severe breathing problems and sometimes to death.
"When you're drilling and blasting and crushing these materials, you're going to have a lot of silica in the air, but you don't know how much, because there's no way to measure it easily," Miller said. "You can take a sample and send it to a lab, which is the current, standard way of doing it, but most people often don't bother to do that, because it's a pain in the butt and takes a long time. By the time they get the results back, it might not be meaningful to what they were doing the day that it happened."
For years, Miller sought support to develop a portable, real-time silica monitor, similar to the gas monitors commonly worn by coal miners. He finally secured funding soon before he retired, and hired an engineer to continue the work. The project had made good progress, Miller said, but that work is "man-on-the-moon kind of research" that the mining industry won't fund on its own.
"The private sector is dollar-driven," he said. "There's no way they're going to do it unless they absolutely know it's going to make money for them. Normally and historically, they're not motivated to do it."
The work of preventing diseases like silicosis also falls on the public sector, Miller said, because the worst symptoms often don't emerge until years after a worker retires. While people can die from silicosis — 12,900 do each year, a 2019 study found — it more commonly causes disability and makes affected people more susceptive to other diseases, like tuberculosis.
"They usually just have a horrible life and maybe die early, so it's not a real problem for the operator, for the mining guy," Miller said. "He's not going to see the ugliness of it. That's going to be when they're my age, and they're having trouble breathing, and they end up dying 10 years earlier than they otherwise would have. By then, they're long gone from where they worked, and there's no responsibility tied to the people who put them through that."
Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.