CLIMATEWIRE | When federal regulators were crafting a first-ever proposal to protect workers from extreme heat, they relied on government health experts who had been working on the deadly effects of high temperatures for years.
Now that entire team is gone due to President Donald Trump’s personnel purges.
It comes ahead of summertime heat waves that are intensifying because of climate change, raising the stakes for the 2024 draft heat rule that took decades to propose and whose fate now rests in the hands of an administration that is eviscerating climate programs. Extreme heat kills more U.S. residents annually than all other disasters.
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The heat experts have been fired, placed on leave or forced out at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency, called NIOSH, was the first one to sound the alarm on the dangers that heat poses to workers. It recommended safety regulations in 1975, decades before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed the nation’s first heat rule last year.
The entire heat team at NIOSH was pushed out of the agency this spring, along with hundreds of experts who were studying other issues, as part of a massive reorganization at the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The layoffs, which take effect this week, come as climate change supercharges temperatures, blanketing the nation in suffocating heat every summer.
The personnel purge could also hamstring OSHA at the Department of Labor, as the agency considers whether to move forward with finalizing the heat rule under Trump or ditch it. Preserving it promises to be harder without the…
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