Like his father and his grandfather, Marshal Cummings grew up mining trona, a substance used in everything from glass to pharmaceuticals and baking soda. When he was 22, that meant spending 16-hour days in a trona mine in Green River, Wyoming, throwing heavy mining parts onto conveyor belts, up to his knees in muck, with clouds of dust in the air.
“I don't know what I did to myself,” said Cummings, now 36. “I don't know what breathing all that dust did.”
But he knows his collection of newspaper clippings about dead miners is growing. He knows that many of them died of cancer. And he knows that the levels of silica, a carcinogenic substance, in the mines has repeatedly been measured at dangerously high levels.
What Cummings doesn’t know is whether the trona they’ve been mining is adding to the danger.
“I know what silica does,” Cummings said. “Nobody knows with trona.”
In January, Genesis Alkali, the company that owned the mine, canceled a safety audit Cummings had scheduled, according to emails provided to InvestigateWest. Cummings had had enough: Asserting his role as a local union president, he called in the feds for help. In January, he appealed to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — or NIOSH — arguing that “our miners have the right to know if their health is being compromised by inhaling trona dust.”
By February, federal epidemiologist Anne Foreman reached out to him to confirm that she and two other investigators had been assigned to visit the mine to see what they could learn.
“NIOSH is going to identify what's getting people sick and what's killing people, and then they're gonna help solve the problem,” Cummings recalled thinking.
The investigative team never arrived. They’d been ousted due to sweeping federal budget cuts.
“I’ve been fired in the cuts to NIOSH,” Foreman wrote in an April 9 email to Cummings. “I’m emailing you as a concerned citizen now. 92% of NIOSH has been eliminated — including everyone who runs the Health Hazard Evaluation Program.”
For 55 years, the small, little known federal agency has sent specialized teams of trained medical detectives into workplaces to investigate what could be making workers sick — everything from dust, fungus, asbestos and radiation. It’s an agency that has dug into zoos, libraries, aluminum smelters, state crime labs and nuclear weapons facilities. Now, dozens of these ongoing investigations have been canceled.
“We finally get to the point we're going to have some solid data, and it just gets pulled out from under you? It’s infuriating,” Cummings said. “I was so mad.”
The cuts to NIOSH have sparked alarm from Republicans, Democrats, coal miners, labor activists and academics. Beyond just conducting workplace investigations, NIOSH had run programs to test and treat miners for black lung disease, funded safety worker education and even certified the quality of n95 respirators.
Jordan Barab, who worked on worker safety policy as a deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Labor for the Obama administration, told InvestigateWest the cuts to NIOSH could be “catastrophic for workers across the country.”
While legal challenges and the Trump administration have temporarily reversed some of the cuts, Barab says that “lasting damage” has already been done.
To Cummings, the contradiction is particularly frustrating: The same political party that he sees fighting to create more mining jobs is also the party least interested in protecting the miners working them.
“It’s crazy that health and safety has been polarized by politics,” Cummings said.
DOGE Fights
The cuts to NIOSH begin with the richest man in the world: Billionaire CEO Elon Musk, who had been tapped by President Donald Trump to reshape the federal government through an initiative dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE.
Musk brought the same cut-first-ask-questions-later philosophy he’d used to slash jobs after buying the social media site Twitter. Precision wasn’t part of the plan. At a conservative political conference in February, Musk waved around a chainsaw, yelling that it was “the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
The Trump White House has focused on portraying examples of federal spending it sees as particularly wasteful or absurd — like spending $32,000 for the U.S. Embassy in Peru to publish comic books intended to combat anti-gay prejudice.
But the true scope of the planned cuts was far more sweeping: Roughly 10,000 full-time employees were cut from the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes NIOSH.
“Some people are saying, ‘This is what we voted for the administration to do — make cuts,’” Cummings said. “I get it, but health and safety is not the same thing as sending comics to Peru.”
Asked in a CBS interview in April why his agency hadn’t gone through each cut line by line, carefully considering each individually, Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., argued that that mentality was part of an old, failed approach.
"It takes too long. You lose political momentum,” Kennedy said, acknowledging “there are going to be casualties and there are going to be mistakes.”
In one part of the interview, he argued inaccurately that “virtually all the cuts” in the agencies he oversaw related to diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In another, he acknowledged that he himself was unaware of many of the cuts that had been made.
“I'm not even sure how much the new administration knows about what we do, which is maybe why they're cutting us,” said NIOSH industrial hygienist Hannah Echt, speaking with InvestigateWest as a steward for the federal employees union.
In fact, NIOSH was created by Congress, not the executive branch. In 1970, Congress passed a law to create a research agency intentionally separate from regulatory agencies, intending to shelter pure scientific research from the kinds of political winds that could influence regulators. It also let NIOSH play the more likable “good cop” where other federal agencies played the punitive “bad cop.”
"We don't levy fines, we don't close businesses,” Foreman said. “We're not there to be the bad guy.”
But they still had the authority to access private office spaces and factory floors, take air readings, run tests, and interview employees.
In his CBS interview, Kennedy insisted the purpose of the cuts was “not to reduce any level of scientific research that's important.”
And yet, NIOSH’s scientific research, time and time again, had resulted in vital discoveries.
It was a NIOSH investigation into a microwave popcorn plant in 2000 that led to the discovery of "popcorn lung" — a dangerous respiratory condition caused by artificial butter flavorings.
Numerous other NIOSH investigations, including into a coffee roasting facility in Oregon in 2017, have found elevated levels of the same dangerous substance at other workplaces.
Foreman recounts speaking over the phone with “people crying because they’re scared and they’re having cognitive symptoms” from poor indoor air quality.
There have been flight attendants worried about skin problems related to their airline’s new uniform. Hydroelectric dam employees in Idaho reported concerns about breathing in dust from the turbine brakes. Hair and makeup artists working on low-budget films wanted an investigation into constant exposure to theatrical fog in film warehouses.
In the last decade, NIOSH has investigated lead exposures at bullet-recycling companies in New Jersey, dug into tuberculosis outbreaks among elephants in zoos in Portland and Tacoma, and found welders breathing in chromium and nickel at an Oregon airplane part manufacturer.
Sometimes, Foreman said, she’s able to offer reassurances — an investigation reveals that the workplace wasn’t actually dangerous or that an employee had been misdiagnosed. Other times the results reveal more serious deficiencies.
But now, Echt said, over 70 different health hazard investigations have been shut down.
Investigations into allergens at cannabis facilities, diesel exhaust risks at fire departments, and cancer-causing chemicals at a North Carolina State University building have all been halted.
Other workplaces are waiting to receive the results of investigations that have been largely completed. Among them: Multnomah County Library, where employees have increasingly struggled to deal with patrons smoking fentanyl in library bathrooms. The library’s risk management team reached out to NIOSH, hoping to understand if secondhand drug exposure posed a danger to library staffers.
Last June, a team of three Health Hazard Evaluation team members interviewed 95 library employees and tested ventilation systems in three different libraries. In one of the library restrooms, the initial findings revealed that the ventilation fans weren’t working at all.
The final report, said Multnomah County Director of Libraries Annie Lewis, is awaiting approval from NIOSH. Lewis said she’s optimistic it will still be published, but has heard most of the investigative team has been fired.
"If it's not released, we will be very disappointed," Lewis said. "We've
invested a lot of our staff time, a lot of our resources into this
effort, and we are very hopeful that the research will not only benefit Multnomah County Library as an organization, but also public libraries across the nation.”
Even the fate of the NIOSH website — a repository of 55 years of documented research — is uncertain, Foreman said.
Erosion
These cuts to the agency that conducts worker safety research come at the same moment that the Trump administration wants to dramatically expand mining. In early April, Trump stood with an array of coal miners while signing an executive order purporting to officially end the “war on coal.”
“Unfortunately, they're also at the same time declaring a war on coal miners and the health and safety of coal miners,” Barab said.
While new technology can improve safety, it’s also allowed faster mining, seeking out thinner veins through more rock. And that can make it more dangerous. NIOSH data reveals that rates of black lung in coal mines have been steadily climbing after falling for decades.
“You get more rock, you get more ore, you're obviously going to be exposed more,” Cummings said. “More mines means more miners sick, more miners dead.”
In February, Genesis Alkali, the company that owned the mine where Cummings worked, was bought by international trona mining giant WE Soda. Cummings said the new owners appear to genuinely care about protecting workers.
JoAnna DeWald, who oversees health and safety for WE Soda US, wrote in a statement that We Soda has “some of the highest health and safety standards in the industry.” She stressed that, despite the NIOSH cuts, the standards from another federal agency, the Mine and Safety Health Administration, “remain fully in effect.”
But that agency has been targeted for cuts as well. The Wyoming office of the Mine Safety and Health Administration office, which had cited the Green River mine for safety violations this year, is on the chopping block.
Cummings said he looked up the amount of money the closure of the office was supposedly saving on the DOGE website.
“It's going to save them like $48,000 a year,” Cummings said. “That's what my health means to DOGE.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration lifted a new regulation that Cummings had fought for — a rule further limiting the amount of dangerous silica dust miners were allowed to breathe. The new rule required some miners to carry new respirator devices to measure the silica levels, but it had been up to NIOSH to certify those new devices — a task the hobbled agency put on hold.
“They basically suspended all enforcement of the standard because of a problem that they themselves created,” said Barab, the former Obama administration official.
Support Beams
“A lot of unscrupulous mine operators are going to be delighted about this because, that's fewer regulations that they have to comply with,” Barab said. “They can make more money, but they're making more money off the blood and the health of coal miners.”
But the reaction from many supporters of the mining industry has been less than enthusiastic.
U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, stood beside Trump for his “war on coal” executive order.
Just a few weeks later Capito was waging a public battle to try to save NIOSH, sending a letter to Kennedy lamenting the loss of specialized labs "where dedicated scientists with years of training had been researching coal and silica dust along with black mold.”
Decommissioning the labs alone would cost millions of taxpayer dollars, she said.
"I urge you to bring back the NIOSH employees immediately so they can continue to support our nation's coal industry,” Capito said.
Freshman Republican Rep. Michael Baumgartner, representing Eastern Washington state, also sent a letter to Kennedy, arguing that shuttering NIOSH's Spokane Research Lab would be a "setback for the natural resource industries in the western part of the country."
He quoted a Spokane-based mining association statement arguing that NIOSH plays an "important role in research and development for the mining industry" and that if the Trump administration wants to ramp up mineral production, "we need NIOSH... now more than ever."
Baumgartner also included a quote from an unnamed operations and safety director of a mine in Alaska, noting that “people will not seek employment in the industry if they believe they are risking their health and lives… NIOSH does a good job in mitigating the fact that not every mining company prioritizes safety the way they should.”
The lobbying appears to have had some impact: Some NIOSH employees have temporarily been brought back to the Spokane and West Virginia offices, including those certifying respirators. Most of the staff dedicated to health hazard evaluations aren’t among them, and the program remains frozen.
Employees like Echt and Foreman remained on administrative leave, with their termination officially scheduled for late June or early July.
But last week, a federal judge granted a temporary freeze on firings in a lawsuit brought by federal employee unions, concluding that the Trump administration needed congressional cooperation for such a sweeping reorganization.
Similarly, this month, 20 attorneys general — including those from Oregon and Washington — have filed a lawsuit over the cuts to Health and Human Services, including NIOSH.
But even if every job is restored, Echt said, plenty of employees have taken early retirements and left for the private sector, taking with them their years of experience.
“When you eliminate these agencies and then decide to build them back up again, you have to go and rehire people again — and you've got to find the expertise,” Barab said.
From his position in Wyoming, Cummings sees the fight of employees like Foreman as inseparable from his own union battles.
Cummings said he was in the middle of writing an email to his Wyoming congressional representatives about the NIOSH cuts when he got a phone call telling him that yet another local trona miner — a longtime family friend whom Cummings had called “uncle” — had died from cancer.
“The funeral was on Good Friday,” Cummings said. “It's almost like — we can't let this up. We have to see it to the end.”
Daniel Walters is a Report for America corps member who covers democracy and extremism across the region. He can be reached at daniel@investigatewest.org.