UW department of environmental & occupational health sciences prepares to lose NIOSH funding despite absence of formal notification | Science

Many researchers continue learning of upcoming funding eliminations before formal notifications are administered in the era of DOGE’s near-constant budget cuts across the federal government. For organizations funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) within UW’s department of environmental & occupational health sciences, such as the Northwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety (NWCOHS) and the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center (PNASH), researchers are already preparing for the worst in anticipation of losing their funding.

“There’s two specific center grants that our department has from NIOSH,” Christopher Simpson, director of NWCOHS and deputy director for PNASH, said. “In addition, we have faculty here in the department [that] have something like four additional individual investigator grants. So all of those are part of the NIOSH extramural program.” 

NIOSH’s extramural program funds university research through competitive grant awards, on five-year timelines. NWCOHS has been continually funded by this program and is in its fifth year of funding. However, after submitting a competing renewal application in December 2024, their scheduled review meeting in February was canceled due to NIOSH and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) being placed under a communications embargo by the Trump administration. According to Simpson, NIOSH remains under that communications embargo, and NWCOHS has not had any formal communication with them since.

Simpson and his colleagues, however, are well aware that they will be losing funding. The canceled review was the first of a series of events that needed to take place in order to be awarded another five years of funding. At this rate, according to Simpson, it would be impossible to complete this process before the end of June when their funding ends.

A draft budget of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was also leaked in late April, which eliminated NIOSH extramural programs such as NWCOHS. Most remaining staff at NIOSH have since been laid off, leaving questions about who would be left to perform the reviews necessary to reinstate funding. 

Simpson is also working with PNASH to study efficient life jackets for fishermen, a project in its third year of their five-year NIOSH funding. Their grant requires an annual Notice of Award to have the authorization to spend money for the next year. However, those working on the project are expecting not to receive a new Notice of Award, effectively ending their funding Sept. 29, even though the congressional budget has already appropriated that money for the 2025 fiscal year budget.

“It seems clear that the federal government does not intend to spend that money,” Simpson said. 

Having mapped out their research over a five-year timeline, eliminating their funding at year three halts their project part way through data collection.

“There will not be money for people to analyze the data, learn from it what we expect to learn, and then disseminate the findings from those particular studies,” Simpson said. “So essentially, that effort would have been wasted.” 

Simpson wrote a declaration as part of a lawsuit formed by multiple U.S. states against HHS. The plaintiffs argue that HHS did not have the authority to make the changes to the congressional budget that they did since only Congress can eliminate an agency, and HHS is required to spend that funding as directed. So far, the preliminary injunction was denied May 23.

As the lawsuit continues, Simpson emphasized the importance of agencies like NIOSH.

“The fact remains that many workers still die on the job, even here in the U.S., every year,” Simpson said. “Many workers experience illness or injury on the job. The whole purpose of the NIOSH funding and these NIOSH centers is to make work safer, so that people don’t get injured or sick or die on the job, so that they can be confident when they go to work in the morning they’re going to be able to come home to their families at the end of the day.” 

Reach reporter Leah Downing at [email protected]. X: @leahjdowning Bluesky: @leahjdowning.bsky.social

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