The Trump administration has gutted the agency overseeing the World Trade Center Health Program, a move advocates say will wreak havoc on the program’s operations and bring critical operations to a standstill.
Tens of thousands of responders and survivors rely on the WTC Health Program to get treatment and medication and monitor injuries and illnesses caused by the toxins that swirled around Ground Zero during on 9/11 and the weeks that followed.
Trump Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. has launched the gutting process of laying off around two-thirds of the staff at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, a federal health agency.
The World Trade Center Health Program is housed under NIOSH, which in turn is part of the Centers for Disease Control. Around 873 positions are to be culled — including that of Dr. John Howard, the head of NIOSH and the administrator of the 9/11 first responders health treatment and monitoring program.
No other WTC Health Program employees have been fired but the program relies on doctors, epidemiologists, and administrative staffers who work for the broader agency, so the NIOSH firings pose a threat, survivor advocates claim. Key tasks such as evaluating new applications to the program are done by NIOSH doctors.
“These cuts to NIOSH will be devastating to the World Trade Center Health Program and must be stopped. The first step must be restoring Dr. Howard as NIOSH Director immediately,” Benjamin Chevat, executive director of Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act, said in a statement, calling the move “another example of chainsaw incompetence.”
John Feal, a longtime 9/11 survivor advocate who lead a team to Washington D.C. to get the James Zadroga Act — which created the WTC Health Program — passed, called the cutting of NIOSH and Dr. Howard’s firing “the most reckless, careless, unconscionable, disgusting, and vile act against those in the 9/11 community that has been committed since Sept. 11, 2001.”
“Welcome to being part of the atrocity because you have bellied up to the bar for a drink with those who caused that fateful day,” said Feal. “You have damaged thousands of people in an instant with your actions today, you have caused irreparable PTSD with your actions today and you have torn thousands of families apart with your actions today.
“You have spit in the faces of the 9/11 Community for the last time,” he said.
It’s now unclear how the program will be run and who, if not NIOSH staffers, will handle contracts, communications, HR, grants, and other essential operations
This all comes despite the fact that drastic cuts to the 9/11 program were reversed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers sounded the alarm. The rare reversal from Trump in February saw him restore two research grants and the jobs of 16 employees.
“After cutting this program’s staff directly a few weeks ago and having to rescind those cuts under pressure we would have thought that the Trump Administration or the new HHS Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr. would have learned their lesson and would have thought before cutting, but that, sadly, was not the case,” Chevat said.
The program was also threatened under the last Trump administration. In 2018, the admin proposed reshuffling the agency to put it under the purview of just the CDC.
It’s estimated that over 400,000 people were affected by the toxins swirling over Ground Zero. More than 127,000 people have been enrolled in the WTC Health Program.
Out of that number more than 81,000 have a certified 9/11 illness from their exposure during and after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center, as well as the hijacked plane crashes in Shanksville, Pa., and at the Pentagon, according to the program’s website.
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