Millions of Chickens Were Culled. Workers Got Sick. Then the Safety Experts Got Cut.
NIOSH is another casualty of the targeting of government programs — and experts say the country will be worse off without its work.
As the H5N1 bird flu spiked across the country last year, a team of investigators made a startling finding at a hotspot in Colorado. The virus was surging amid a heatwave there, requiring the euthanization of millions of chickens. And it had started to spread to some of the workers who had been doing the culling.
The team of investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and a sub-agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), shrewdly identified giant fans that had been brought into the barns to address the heat as one of the culprits in actually helping the virus spread.
As a group of top epidemiologists laid out in Stat News recently, this is the kind of critical, often unheralded work that NIOSH engages in. The agency, which was signed into existence by Richard Nixon in 1970, is the research arm of the federal government’s workplace safety apparatus. It focuses on the most at-risk workers, in fields like fire-fighting, healthcare, mining and construction, and has done fundamental investigative work to understand and uncover hazards around indoor air quality, environmental exposures, workplace violence and bloodborne infections.
The N95 masks that are so critical during pandemics or for other respiratory hazards at work? Their quality is certified by NIOSH.
But recent cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services decimated the agency, reducing its staff of over 1,000 by 85 percent or more, to around 150 — nearly wiping out its capacities. To say that occupational safety advocates, labor unions and others are alarmed is an understatement. This seems to be a direct blow to the idea that workplaces should be monitored for safety.
The Associated Press succinctly laid out NIOSH’s track record:
NIOSH investigators identified a new lung disease in workers at factories that made microwave popcorn, and helped assess what went wrong during the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. It was recently involved in the CDC’s response to measles, advising on measures to stop spread within hospitals.
Some of its best-known work is related to mining. It trains and certifies doctors in how to test for black lung disease, and the agency conducts its own mobile screenings of miners. For years, NIOSH owned an experimental mine in Pennsylvania and two years ago announced it was developing a replacement research facility near Mace, West Virginia, that would feature tunnels and other mine structures.
Its research and recommendations have served as the foundation for Department of Labor rules for worker protection, including one issued last year for coal miners that cuts by half the permissible exposures to poisonous silica dust.
I reached out to Dr. David Michaels, who headed up OSHA, a related agency at the Department of Labor that upholds and enforces workplace safety codes, under Obama, to get his read.
“NIOSH does invaluable and irreplaceable work,” said Michaels, who is now a public health professor at George Washington University. “They're the center of all research activities in occupational safety and health in this country. There's very little interest or ability of the private sector to do this type of research. And it will almost disappear. There's no one who thinks that we shouldn't be doing this work except perhaps Elon Musk.”
Safe workplaces don’t just benefit workers. They help employers maintain productivity and continuity. As Stat News notes: “Injuries, chronic diseases, and mental health outcomes are estimated to cost U.S. businesses hundreds of millions to trillions of dollars annually, with individual cases that suggest a strong value on investment in such approaches. In comparison, the cost of NIOSH programs equal approximately $2 per U.S. worker annually.”
HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON:
“THE ‘NERD’ REICH”: I was out on a road trip with my kids for spring break last week, but I wanted to follow up on my colleague William Fitzgerald’s excellent piece on the limits of tech-industry driven urbanism. His account from his time at Google of the company’s ill-fated ventures into urban planning, was particularly revealing.
In an interview with KQED, journalist Gil Duran expanded further on the ideas that are driving the push for things like unregulated city-states which William mentioned. Duran, who has a newsletter of his own, has a very direct, smart take about how this push for a regulation and democracy-free world came to Washington. This ethos, seen most prominently in the DOGE effort, actually originated with tech barons, and some once fringey thinkers in and around Silicon Valley.
This is hard-to-believe-we-are-here stuff; a stylistic mash-up of dark science fiction, apocalyptic fever dreams and paranoid blog posts that fantasize about melting the government down into a shadow company run by a CEO who is freed from the restrictions of law and bureaucracy.
Kudos to KQED and its host for running the interview, but it is unfortunately par for the course that these ideas aren’t getting wider attention. It reminds me of a central issue with the news business right now: mainstream media relies on the notion that both parties may disagree but are a) operating in a sane way, and b) acting in good faith. When that playbook is out the window, the mission — and business plan — is scrambled.
Overall the interview was very well-done, but there was a whiff of that kind of reflexive softening at one point, when the host noted that the ideas Duran was talking about were “not very mainstream stuff.” Duran’s whole point is that the spirit of these ideas are now percolating at highest echelons of power, as extreme as they are. That’s the opposite of being “not very mainstream.” As Duran said:
I didn't get this from Secret Documents or from insider testimony. They've put this in podcasts, they've put it in books, they have a whole conference about it once a year. They are very open about this idea, but very few people have paid attention, I think, because it sounds like the kind of thing that internet trolls talk about.
A DETAILED AND VERY INTERESTING report from the WSJ about how Mark Zuckerberg has allegedly been trying to pay his way out of a major antitrust trial at the FTC, including extensive courtship of Trump. The piece includes this fiery quote from former FTC chair Lina Khan:
Mark bought his way out of competing, so I’m not surprised that he thinks he can buy his way out of law enforcement, too,” said Khan, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden. “His proposed remedy, like his market strategy, is: ‘let my illegal monopoly keep monopolizing.’
FEDERAL SPENDING IS UP: Remember a few weeks ago how we talked about how much of the DOGE coverage was, perhaps unintentionally, hyping up its work to supposedly make government smaller and cut spending? That doesn’t appear to be DOGE’s mission. It isn’t its effect, yet. See this chart from the raging communists at the WSJ: How Government Spending Is Up Even as Musk Touts Savings.
WORKPLACE SAFETY:
11 regional OSHA offices in places like Texas, Louisiana and Illinois were closed, and their safety inspectors reassigned, in cuts driven by the DOGE team this week, according to David Michaels.
A rundown of NIOSH’s accomplishments over the last 50 years
El Salvador is preparing to expand its megaprison to hold up to 80,000 people, the WSJ reports, with one anonymous source telling the paper the capacity would be for use by the US. h/t @briantashman
A CALL TO ACTION by a 20-year Google employee at The Nation over the company’s increased role in military contracting, including in Gaza.
ALSO: The US proved Google ‘willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts,’ in The Verge.
The Economic Security Project: BREAKING: AP is reporting that the Trump admin plans to shut down IRS #DirectFile — the free, easy, and wildly popular tax filing tool available to millions of Americans. Why? It threatens the profits of billion-dollar tax prep corporations.
Full story, from the AP.
The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI (Mother Jones)
And finally, some LIGHTER FARE: We love the Subway Takes guy. This was a nice profile about his life and viral success in Rolling Stone.