By Mary LeBus and Brenda Ordonez
Published: Apr. 1, 2025 at 3:55 PM EDT|Updated: Apr. 1, 2025 at 6:25 PM EDT
CINCINNATI (WXIX) - Hundreds of people in Cincinnati are expected to lose their jobs as another round of mass layoffs begins nationwide.
Employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health received a notice Tuesday from the Department of Health and Human Services that it will be reducing its workforce in the coming months.
“An email went out this morning - employees either got a memo of a plan for Reduction in Force or RIF, or they got notified that they were being RIFed or fired,” NIOSH industrial hygienist and AFGE Local 3840 steward Hannah Echt told FOX19 NOW.
According to the letter that was sent to a bargaining unit employee, the reduction will begin June 30 with “formal notices” being sent to affected employees 60 days prior.
Echt says she believes about 800 people in her department nationwide received the letter, around 400 of which work in Cincinnati.
Meanwhile, non-unionized workers will be placed on immediate administrative leave at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Echt said.
“Basically, they’re gutting our institute and just keeping a couple programs, and I think only Public Health Service Commission officers,” Echt explained.
She says some of the programs that will be cut include the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer, which collects data on the occurrence of cancer in firefighters, and the Health Hazard Evaluation Program, which is the division Echt works in.
“I think a lot of people were very surprised by how quickly this all happened today - a lot of us are in shock over here,” she added.
These job cuts are an addition to the thousands of federal employees who were laid off due to two of President Donald Trump’s executive orders: The Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative and the Department of Health and Human Services’ strategy to “improve efficiency and effectiveness.”
According to the HHS, the restructuring will “save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year” after the most recent cut of 10,000 full-time jobs. The current plan of the department is to downsize from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees.
“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” said U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves. That’s the entire American public, because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again.”
We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025
While the Trump Administration says the job cuts will make it more efficient to ensure America is healthy, U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman (OH-D) says it will do the opposite, describing these actions as “pure chaos.”
NIOSH unions, including Cincinnati’s, are now calling on Congress to intervene in the job cuts as health challenges continue to grow.
“It is not the fault of federal employees that the American quality of life is declining,” said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, Vice President of AFGE Local 3840. “We know that the root cause is the privatization of healthcare and the insurance companies profiting from our suffering. To blame dedicated public servants for the problems caused by these profit-driven corporations is both misguided and inappropriate. No amount of restructuring and reducing the public health workforce will improve the health of Americans if the root cause of their declining health is not addressed.”
Currently, NIOSH employs over 1,300 people across the country that work in epidemiology, medicine, nursing, workplace safety and more. In 2021, the agency employed about 700 people at its two Cincinnati offices in Pleasant Ridge and Columbia Tusculum.
correction: The number of layoffs in an earlier version of this story has been updated. FOX19 is working to confirm exact numbers.
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