The agency you’ve never heard of
Firefighters take on risks the rest of us never will. This spring, the small group of federal scientists who track how those risks affect their bodies came close to losing their jobs.
What NIOSH does
CDC runs the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which studies how people get hurt at work. It tracks cancer in firefighters. It investigates firefighter deaths on the job. It studies lung disease in coal miners. It helps administer care for 9/11 responders and reconstructs radiation doses for workers who got sick after nuclear-weapons work.
This spring, the administration moved to cut it hard, at one point, by more than 90% of the staff. Internal CDC emails released by Senator Bernie Sanders this week lay out what that looked like, program by program.
The National Firefighter Registry for Cancer had enrolled tens of thousands of firefighters. Firefighters get certain cancers at higher rates, and Congress created the registry to measure it.