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.
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.
The investigative team never arrived. They’d been ousted due to sweeping federal budget cuts.
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.”
Lambert here: Wait. Since when has killing and maiming workers for profit ever been a “mistake”?
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 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.
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.
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.”
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