Some federal employees at Cincinnati's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health facilities are back on the job after being laid off by the Trump administration earlier this month.
NIOSH is responsible for research and recommendations aimed at preventing workplace illness and injury.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIOSH, sent notices to almost 900 of the institute's employees earlier this month. That was roughly 90% of NIOSH's workforce, which had already been winnowed down by buyout offers and previous smaller reductions in force.
The cuts were part of the Trump administration's drive to slash federal spending. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said his goal is eliminating roughly 20,000 jobs from DHHS, which employed 82,000 workers at the beginning of the Trump administration. So far, it's cut about 10,000 positions.
The notifications triggered protests, legal challenges and concerns that NIOSH wouldn't be able to continue its mission researching worker health and safety best practices and evaluating the safety of workplaces.
Last week, about 300 of the employees at various NIOSH sites received notice their jobs were being reinstated. Those jobs include roles that help miners get help for respiratory ailments and positions that research measures to keep firefighters safe.
Local union representatives say the situation is fluid and it's not yet clear exactly how many Cincinnati workers the reinstatements apply to.
NIOSH has two offices in Cincinnati — Pleasant Ridge's Alice Hamilton Laboratory for Occupational Safety and Health, and Linwood's Robert A. Taft Occupational Safety and Health Laboratory. About 400 employees in total were roughly equally distributed between the two before job reductions.
'It's bittersweet'
Researchers who work on a cancer registry for firefighters are among those returning locally. Micah Niemeier-Walsh is one of them. She also leads the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees.
"It's bittersweet being back at the job," Niemeier-Walsh said. "I'm obviously very happy to be back at my role, but also, I won't really feel relieved until all of my coworkers have their jobs back."
Some workers who perform research for NIOSH's Health Hazards Evaluations program in Cincinnati also will be reinstated. But Niemeier-Walsh says other key roles at NIOSH show no signs of being restored by the Trump administration.
"Many of the NIOSH employees who haven't been reinstated are folks who fulfill some of the congressionally mandated parts of NIOSH," Niemeier-Walsh said. "For example, all of the folks who do recommended exposure limits for chemicals [workers can be exposed to on job sites]."
About a third of the job restorations are at NIOSH's Morgantown, West Virginia, facility. Sen. Shelly Moore Capito of West Virgina posted on X last week that more than 100 jobs there will be restored, many of them involving the health of coal miners.
The announcement of the job restorations came just hours before a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering DHHS to reverse the cuts. That decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by a miner in West Virginia.
Workers at a NIOSH site in Pittsburgh also received notices they were being reinstated. But as in Cincinnati, union leaders there said it was uncertain exactly how many jobs there were being restored.
Niemeier-Walsh said programs in Cincinnati and elsewhere will continue to struggle without full staffing at NIOSH. And some union leaders have expressed apprehension about what could come next.
Internal emails within DHHS first reported by the publication Government Executive suggest the 300 jobs restored at NIOSH could be offset by cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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