NIOSH to Cut Nearly All Remaining Staff

Nearly all of the remaining staff at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health were laid off Friday, multiple officials and laid-off employees told CBS News.
That followed an initial round of layoffs on April 1 at the agency ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
New requests for investigations of firefighter injuries and workplace health hazards had already stopped being accepted, CBS reported.
Layoff notices received by workers Friday were almost identical to those received in the initial round of Kennedy’s cuts, which said that their duties “have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.”
The main difference with Friday’s layoff notices was the date they take effect: workers are being put on leave until an official separation from service on July 2, instead of in June.
In a post Saturday on X, the department said that firefighter programs were still a top priority and that as “the agency continues to streamline operations, the essential services provided by NIOSH will remain fully intact and uninterrupted.”
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Johns Hopkins University and Medicine have approved amendments to its Workforce Member Work-Related Incident and Injury Reporting Policy, effective May 1.
The group has 40,000 full-time faculty and staff members, making it among Maryland’s largest private employers and the largest in Baltimore City.
The simplified approach is designed to ensure employees’ needs are met in the event of work-related incidents and injuries, and to remove any barriers that may delay reporting and/or obtaining treatment.
Among the updates, supervisor signatures are no longer required for submitting incident forms. Instead, supervisors will be notified by email if an incident is submitted for their direct reports.
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Recent analysis by Dallas-based contractor and supplier management consulting firm ISN shows that the number of serious injuries and fatalities, of SIFs, in construction declined 17% in 2023 compared to the previous year.
“The bad news is on a macrolevel across all industries, even though lagging measures such as recordable rates and lost time rates have steadily come down from where they historically have been, fatalities have flatlined for the last 10 years,” said Duane Duhamel, director of health, safety and sustainability at ISN, according to Construction Dive.
ISN examined recordable incidents from 2017 to 2023 identifying 19,900 potential SIF cases. With 2023 logging the lowest total since 2017, ISN suggests its a positive trend as industries focus on high-consequence event prevention and safety culture initiatives such as Human and Organizational Performance, an operational philosophy that shifts the focus from worker behavior to the processes designed to protect the worker.
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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers teams around the world will participate in OSHA’s nationwide Safety Stand-Down to Prevent Falls in Construction this week.
USACE numbers are significantly lower than the national average, according to the Army.
The Corps developed its first safety manual, EM 385-1-1 Safety and Health Requirements Manual in 1941, 30 years before OSHA was created.
USACE will be launching a new Fall Protection Program later this fiscal year.
The initiative will simplify and standardize safe work practices at height with clearer guidance, easier processes, and tools that empower every worker at every site to stay safe and speak up.
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