MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA — Almost two weeks ago, A. Scott Laney was one of thousands of federal employees wondering where the Department of Government Efficiency axe would fall.
On March 30, Laney and approximately 900 National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health employees found out on a Signal app chat.
Laney technically is a respiratory health specialist working with the Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program — a key part of the federal government’s mine safety and health efforts since passage of the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act 56 years ago.
Until June 2, when his administrative leave ends and he becomes a former government employee.
“We were getting a real-time readout on the call to (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) that day,” Laney said Wednesday. “We found out then that NIOSH was being eliminated.”
With 19½ years of CDC government service — 15 of that in NIOSH — the 51-year old Laney would have been eligible for retirement in February 2026.
Two hours after the Signal chat, Laney said, employees in his section and across NIOSH started getting more details from the Association of Federal Government Employees — the union representing many CDC and NIOSH employees.
“At 5 a.m. Wednesday (March 31), a lot of us started receiving (reduction in force) notices,” Laney added. “Three or four hours later, we were told we had until close of business to collect our belongings from the office.”
Since the notice of firings came, Laney said a range of key NIOSH services and programs for coal miners have stopped. CWHSP — which offers free chest X-rays and pulmonary exams to working miners at their mine sites — has stopped operations.
Part 90 is another NIOSH program that allows miners with signs of black lung or silicosis from exposure to coal and/or rock dust in mine operations to transfer to jobs with less dust exposure at their mines.
“Miners could call NIOSH at any time to make Part 90 requests and get those transfers,” said Laney. “With the personnel cuts, now they can’t.”
NIOSH also have maintained an archive of physical X-ray films and digital X-ray imagery from CWHSP spanning decades. Besides providing data the agency has used to detect trends in black lung disease among active and retired miners, miners, their spouses and widows can contact NIOSH to access those records when filing black lung claims.
Until a week ago.
“Nobody’s at NIOSH to take calls or act on requests for the X-rays,” said Laney. “We have more than 750,000 X-rays in our basement, and my fear is that it may all end up in a dumpster somewhere.”
“We have 10 years of digital X-rays on servers in our building too, along with mounds of pulmonary function tests,” Laney added. “I don’t have any confidence that anyone looking in our computers will know what they’re looking at. With the care they’ve taken in cutting employees, I can’t imagine they’re going to take any more care with our coal miners.”
NIOSH’s work goes beyond miners of all kinds — coal, metal ore, sand, minerals — Laney said, and the agency is the only one tasked under federal law wit that particular monitoring and research.
“We provide a service with our mobile vans and X-rays,” Laney said. “If a miner shows signs of high blood pressure — another symptom of complicated black lung — we can take steps at the site to have them taken to a hospital for evaluation right then.”
No other federal agency is set up to do the statistical counting and research on miners’ health that CWHSP and NIOSH handle, Laney said.
CWHSP and NIOSH have worked with several black lung clinics across the U.S. to study the disease’s impacts and trends among miners. Laney said that cooperation helped in recent years to establish that miners diagnosed with black lung and silicosis were getting younger over the decades.
NIOSH also handled another important part of the black lung diagnosis and claims process — certifying and training radiologists known as B-readers. Those specialists — approximately 200 nationwide — are the only persons certified federally to diagnose black lung from X-rays.
“No other agency does that, and that’s codified under federal law,” Laney said.
NIOSH’s responsibilities go beyond mining, Laney said — workplace safety, air sampling in the wake of disasters and hazmat situations, certification of personal protective equipment, global response to help health care workers facing outbreaks of diseases like Ebola.
“During COVID, NIOSH certified respirators and N-95 masks imported during the shortage,” Laney said. “85 percent of those masks failed standards, and we got 3M and other U.S. manufacturers onboard to start producing those masks.”
“NIOSH prevents countless lost lives and, with these cuts, this is about killing American workers. We liked to say we’re the agency you’ve never heard of that saved your life.”
Laney said he and fellow NIOSH staff traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Virginia U.S. Sen. Mark Warner and other legislators to tell their story and stress the need for what NIOSH does.”
“I couldn’t look my kids in the eye if I didn’t do this.”