Following a reduction-in-force (RIF) effort at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in 2025, employees received a notice on January 13, 2026, that this order had been reversed. After nine months, all full-time NIOSH employees were to return to work.
“Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, the nation’s critical public health functions remain intact and effective. The Trump Administration is committed to protecting essential services—whether it’s supporting coal miners and firefighters through NIOSH, safeguarding public health through lead prevention, or researching and tracking the most prevalent communicable diseases. Enhancing the health and well-being of all Americans remains our top priority,” said Emily Hilliard, the press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in an email response following a request to speak with a reinstated NIOSH scientist.
One NIOSH scientist who received a RIF notice and was reinstated said that they had mixed emotions to the reversals of the RIFs. “I am thrilled that everyone has been reinstated. I’m really scared about what the day-to-day job is going to look like because there are just so many unknowns. I am really excited to go back and to kind of see what the next phase of NIOSH looks like. And I’m, at the same time, grieving that I’m losing a lot of my co-workers because a lot of people are not returning because of the uncertainty and the stress that’s related to the job,” said the researcher, who requested to remain anonymous.
While returning NIOSH employees, public health researchers, and advocates alike expressed their happiness to see the RIF be reversed, many pointed out that the damage already done will be hard to repair.
NIOSH RIFs Put Workplace Health and Safety Research on Pause
On April 1, 2025, hundreds of employees at NIOSH woke up to an email that, effective immediately, their services were no longer required. The communication instructed them to stop all work immediately and to remove their belongings from their offices and workspaces.
The NIOSH scientist recalled walking the halls of the building that they had worked in, helping colleagues collect their personal items, consoling others, and trying to find out how to put a pause on research that, in some cases, had been going on for years. “It was a lot of really chaotic, high emotion time because we had no idea it was coming. So, we were completely thrown for a loop,” said the employee, who worked in the Health Effects Laboratory Division studying immune responses to occupational exposures. They added that, at that time, their group had been prepared to start a months-long experiment to complement other work; the RIF halted that study. “That was years of scientific effort that was essentially thrown away.”
Indeed, across NIOSH, the RIF paused programs to study workplace technology and survey worker health. Gerald Poplin, an epidemiologist and former associate director for science for the NIOSH Spokane Mining Research Division, led the Miner Health Program. The initiative focused on efforts to understand and improve the health and well-being of all mine workers. “From a scientific standpoint, anytime you have to stop midway through a research project, it’s not good for the research and for the science,” Poplin said. “That can be recovered over time, but you can’t just pick up where you left off, and the research that we were doing definitely took a hit,” he said.
In May, labor and workplace health and safety unions filed a lawsuit against HHS, citing that the RIFs were illegal; subsequent parties also filed related lawsuits. This put NIOSH researchers on administrative leave, protecting them from being fired, but still preventing them from performing their work. “It got to a point where my individual job was dependent on a Supreme Court decision, which as a scientist is just a really wild thing to experience,” the returning NIOSH researcher said.
The researcher added that the RIFs were additionally upsetting because the agency had recovered from closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a new generation of scientists was starting; the extended period of administrative leave interrupted this productivity. “Having all of that thrown to the wayside, I think, was really damaging to a lot of people’s individual careers,” the scientist said.
Olivia Zarella, a public health researcher at the University of Colorado, spoke to researchers impacted by the RIFs. “What I’ve heard from individuals is it was life-changing,” she said, pointing out how the prolonged period of uncertainty was stressful and scary.
As a result, some researchers took early retirements or found other employment. For example, Poplin left NIOSH in October for personal reasons. “It was objectively easy for me to decide to separate, but it was emotionally challenging. So, a lot of the work and people that I work with meant a lot to me, but given my circumstances, it was not objectively difficult [to leave].”
As sidelined employees waited to see what happed while these lawsuits started the slow journey through the judicial system, other concerned individuals found groups to advocate for affected employees and the services that NIOSH provides America’s workplaces. For example, Zarella joined an advocacy group and helped launch a campaign that promoted the work that NIOSH’s mine safety researchers did to protect miners across the country.
“I just wanted to get involved and support federal workers while they were going through this and use my advocacy ability to communicate the importance of NIOSH and communicate the importance of this workforce to the general public,” said Zarella, who spoke on her own behalf. She said that the group also explained how not only did NIOSH’s research and surveillance protect worker’s health, but by preventing workplace injuries and health detriments, their work reduced downstream costs.
These efforts led to Senators asking HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the closure of NIOSH’s Mine Safety Division in a committee hearing. Indeed, the NIOSH researcher said that, when they and their colleagues went to speak to Congresspeople, they encountered support across the political parties for NIOSH workers. Eventually, this congressional pressure led to the HHS reversing the RIFs.
Reinstating NIOSH is a Public Health Win, but Challenges Remain
Zarella said that when she heard the news, she was so relieved that she cried. “I was just incredibly happy for those federal workers,” she said. She recalled going to her favorite Mexican restaurant to celebrate and calling her husband to tell him that she just got the best news she had heard in a while.
Although Poplin would not be returning to NIOSH, he also said that he was happy to hear about the reversals and relieved for his colleagues. “NIOSH is the only federal agency charged with protecting US workers,” he said. “It’s good for the country to have this resource available.”
While the decision marked a clear win for research and public health, many obstacles remained. The reinstated NIOSH scientist explained that the email that they and other employees received was not clear about expectations, leading to uncertainty about what the future of NIOSH would look like. At first, they weren’t certain if they would return, but they said that the directors of their facility regularly updated them with information as they received it, which helped solidify their decision. “Every time they gave us a new piece of information, it was more and more reassuring to me that returning to NIOSH was going to be the best choice for me,” they said.
Yet other challenges remained. Two weeks after the reinstatement, the researcher said that they still did not have access to their laboratory. Additionally, as part of the RIF, their animal facility had been decommissioned. The scientist did not have any information about whether or when that facility would be reinstated, leading to the researcher needing to pivot their work to cell-based systems. In other cases, they said, only one or a few scientists on a research project chose to return to NIOSH, so how that work would continue was still unclear.
“It’s great that these RIFs have been reversed, but the damage is done. And the damage is going to take time to reverse,” Zarella said. She pointed out that, because of when the RIFs happened, NIOSH did not have the opportunity to fully acclimate to the new administration, and so it would also have to go through that process while trying to update employee certifications and adapting to a reduced workforce.
Poplin said that NIOSH lost at least 20 percent of its original staff and that he hopes that the agency can replace these roles quickly. He added that in the nearly one year that the agency was shuttered, industry continued to innovate products for personal protective equipment and other technologies to monitor and mitigate workplace hazards; as a result, NIOSH could be facing a backlog of these products to study in regard to their impact on workplace health and safety. In light of these factors, he added that communicating the needs of the researchers to get equipment and workspaces operational again to HHS will be imperative to managing expectations as the NIOSH researchers return to their work. “It’s a good problem to have given the alternative,” he said.
While teams would need to replace reagents, re-form partnerships, and recertify equipment, the researcher said that they believe that their work is important to the country’s workforce. “It’s going to take a lot more effort to get where we need to go, but I’m really stubborn, and I’m willing to do that effort,” they said.
Although Zarella was excited about the RIF reversal, she also expressed outstanding concerns. “We want to take a win as we get it, but also, when does the next shoe drop in a way. So, it’s definitely a mental load,” she said. While the returning researcher acknowledged that there could be RIFs in the future, they said that they weren’t dwelling on those thoughts because they aren’t productive. “My outlook is cautiously optimistic,” they said.
Zarella added that she hoped that NIOSH is now better understood as an essential part of the workforce. All three agreed that this experience emphasized the importance of communicating the importance of research at NIOSH and at other institutions.
The returning NIOSH scientist added, “Scientists need to use their voices to advocate for both our work and the work of other people because the science needs to keep happening no matter who’s in charge of the government.”
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