When Wildfire Smoke Arrived from Canada, Federal Safety Experts Were Gone

CLIMATEWIRE | When wildfire smoke wafted from Canada across large swaths of the U.S. in 2023, it served as a wake-up call for federal safety experts. They drafted recommendations to protect outdoor workers from increasingly prevalent smoke.

This time, the experts are on administrative leave.

That has left a void in the federal health response to the plumes of wildfire smoke that spread across the Midwest earlier this month. The workforce purge under President Donald Trump is also raising questions about whether the 350-page report that was issued after the 2023 fires would ever be finalized, a requirement before its recommendations for protecting workers can be implemented.

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About 80 people who worked on the draft wildfire assessment are slated to be laid off from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for researching how to prevent workplace injuries and death.

Each page of the 2023 report states that its findings should not be cited before it’s finalized, a process that includes peer review. If it’s not completed, health advocates say, employers could lack awareness for how to protect the health of an estimated 20 million laborers who are increasingly being threatened by wildfire smoke.

“The smoke from wildland fires is only becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and yet the experts that know how to protect workers from it are not available, so it’s a real loss,” said Rebecca Reindel, who directs occupational health and safety for the AFL-CIO.

The layoffs at NIOSH are part of a broad reorganization at DHS under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has prioritized Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. The effort resulted in some 10,000 department employees receiving so-called reduction-in-force notices, including many environmental health experts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which houses NIOSH, saw its entire National Center for Environmental Health shuttered through administrative leave — including asthma and air pollution staff who also worked on wildfire smoke.

That left them unable to answer calls from local health departments, doctors and parents in June as wildfire smoke blew into Midwest communities.

At the time, one expert who was on leave told POLITICO’s E&E News, “It feels like we are leaving them on their own to handle this when we should be there to help.”

Their RIF notices were revoked one week later.

Some staffers at NIOSH have also been called back to work, including experts on personal protective equipment, firefighting and black lung. But the agency’s wildfire smoke experts were not reinstated.

The 2023 smoke event had forced a reckoning at NIOSH. It was a realization that wildfires could affect workers who weren’t actively fighting the blazes.

“We realized that there are a lot of workers that are outside all day long and they’re not wildland firefighters, but they don’t have an opportunity to get out of wildfire smoke,” said one NIOSH expert who was granted anonymity because their employment status is in flux.

The team of 80 staffers set to work in 2023 to conduct research and draft recommendations for how to keep farmworkers and other laborers safe. The issue was a priority for then-Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, who started an initiative to look at the health impacts of extreme heat and wildfire smoke on farmworkers.

When the draft recommendations were published in September 2024, it was the first “federal-level authoritative document that addresses smoke exposures for a wide variety of workers,” the expert said.

The so-called hazard review estimated that 20 million workers are affected by wildfire smoke. It included recommendations for keeping workers safe in smokey conditions, such as how to determine when air quality is unhealthy, when to shorten work shifts, and what types of masks or respirators are effective in smoke.

The NIOSH team was working to finalize the document until its members were put on administrative leave.

“We were really prioritizing it with the intent of it being finished this year because we know these smoke events will keep coming,” the expert said.

Though some staffers who are still at NIOSH have limited knowledge of respirators or smoke protections, none are qualified to finish the document, the person said.

The stalled recommendations were cited by Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, in a report this month that outlined how layoffs at NIOSH could hamper worker safety. Washington state is one of three states with regulations requiring employers to protect their workers from wildfire smoke. If the federal document isn’t finalized, “necessary revisions to the Washington wildfire Smoke Rule may not happen,” Murray’s report said.

Federal recommendations would also help California enforce its rules for keeping workers safe in smokey conditions, said Michael Méndez, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how wildfire smoke affects vineyard workers. The state law requires employers to take different steps depending on how bad the air is, based on an official air quality index. That can be “ripe for misinformation, with employers telling workers it is safe to go out without a mask or keeping workers out there,” Méndez said.

“Having a finalized report, having NIOSH staff there to explain it to workers, to translate it into their language, that would be key to keeping workers safe,” he said.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.