When a firefighter dies in the line of duty, a small team of federal health workers is often called on to pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.
That’s what happened after two firefighters died in California in 2020 while searching for an elderly woman in a burning library. It happened in 2023 when a Navy firefighter died in Maryland after a floor collapsed in a burning home. And it happened last year in Georgia when a career battalion chief died after a semitrailer truck exploded.
But President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for conducting those reviews.
At least two-thirds of the employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within HHS, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or will be in June. These cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the team that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths, one of the laid-off investigators told ProPublica.
Most nonunionized NIOSH workers were given until the end of the day to clear out their desks. The layoffs were so abrupt, staff said, that lab animals were left without staff to care for them and had to be euthanized, and an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding and polluting the surrounding environment.
“It was pure chaos,” another NIOSH employee said.
The fatality investigation team was examining deaths at 20 fire departments when the layoff notices arrived. Those probes are now unlikely to be completed, the investigator said.
“The whole intent of this program was that people would learn through tragedy — what happened to one person — so we can prevent it from happening to others,” the investigator said.
The administration’s moves will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases and disrupt a program that provides health care to emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
ProPublica spoke with five NIOSH employees who either led or contributed to firefighter health initiatives and received layoff notices. Most requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the administration.
“The existence of NIOSH is a hard-earned right by the people of America to have a healthy and safe working environment,” said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840, which represents agency employees. “This is an attack on NIOSH employees and federal employees, but it is also an attack on American workers generally.”
Neither the White House nor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has called the shots on many of the administration’s cuts, responded to a request for comment. A NIOSH spokesperson referred questions to HHS.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made some public indications that aspects of the World Trade Center program could be spared, but details remain sparse. The department’s spokesperson said in a statement that programs required by law — such as some of those focused on firefighter health — will continue to operate.
They did not respond to a follow-up question about how those programs will continue after their staffs were terminated.
“It Breaks My Heart”
The investigations performed by the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program are initiated at the request of the fire department that suffered the casualty. The findings are shared with the firefighter’s family in hopes of providing some closure. And the reports are then published, so the broader firefighting community can strengthen its procedures to avoid similar losses.
The Trump administration had already hamstrung the program shortly after the inauguration, initially barring the investigative team from traveling to conduct research, communicating with other agencies and publishing reports, according to the investigator. While the department eventually allowed several of the casualty reports to be published, the rest remain unfinished.
“It breaks my heart that we’re going to just destroy these programs that have made so much progress in protecting the health and safety of our firefighting community,” the investigator said.
The layoff notice the investigator received from HHS said that termination of much of the agency’s staff was “because your duties have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.”
“Leadership at HHS are appreciative of your service,” the notice stated.
The federal firefighting force faces a daunting year, with spending cuts canceling prescribed burns to reduce flammable vegetation and the termination of hundreds of firefighting support staff, even in the face of climate-change-lengthened wildfire seasons.
“At a time when we need to be bolstering these efforts and personnel, it’s pretty damn appalling that we’d be trying to diminish the health benefits for our firefighters and first responders,” a Forest Service firefighter said.
Dismantling the World’s Largest Firefighter Cancer Study
On April 1, the Trump administration also began laying off much of the staff working on the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer.
Its creation in 2018 was a landmark win in a yearslong fight to study why firefighters suffer from certain types of cancer at vastly higher rates than the general population. Both chambers of Congress unanimously passed the bill to create the registry. Trump signed it into law during his first term.
While HHS said in a statement that programs required by law would remain intact, it did not answer a question about whether it would bring back staff to keep the registry running.
Wildland firefighters don’t typically wear respirators while they’re exposed to high levels of smoke. And the protective clothing firefighters wear while battling active blazes contains high levels of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” that have been linked to various types of cancer. But the exact causes of some cancers that occur at high rates among firefighters are not well understood. Female-specific cancers such as ovarian and cervical, for example, have only recently been linked to firefighting.
More than 23,000 firefighters have signed up to participate since the registry launched in April 2023, and the research team recently began an outreach campaign to get to 200,000 participants. With this trove of data, NIOSH researchers planned to dig into numerous under-studied questions, such as what workplace exposures led to cancers that specifically harmed female firefighters, a NIOSH scientist who worked on the program told ProPublica.
Among the thousands who signed up was a federal wildland firefighter who was concerned about spending a career breathing wildfire smoke without a respirator. The decision to throw away such research is disturbing, the firefighter told ProPublica. “I was hoping that something would happen with all that research, that they would protect wildland firefighters.”
With a hollowed-out IT department, the registry’s portal to enroll firefighters quickly went offline.
“It’s devastating,” said Judith Graber, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and co-chair of the board that advises the registry research team. She said the study is “the largest effort ever taken anywhere to understand cancer in firefighters,” but it’s an effort that can’t simply be restarted after the researchers running it are laid off.
Diane Cotter became an activist when her husband, a career firefighter, developed prostate cancer, and she fought for funding of research such as the registry. While she’s a Kennedy supporter, Cotter said the administration went too far in cutting the program and other first responder health initiatives such as the World Trade Center program, which she called “sacred.”
“It’s very important we hold the line on these studies,” she said.
