The Trump administration has fired roughly 20 employees who worked at the National Institutes of Health occupational health and safety division, also known as the division that stops pathogen “lab leaks” from occurring.
The employees were fired as part of cuts to probationary workers that took place across the federal government in February, and were directed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, two sources confirmed to NOTUS. The NIH’s Division of Occupational Health and Safety employs about 170 people in total, according to the Department of Health and Human Services employee directory.
The division’s duties range from maintaining scientific equipment to providing appropriate lab coats or other personal protective apparel to scientists. The work of DOHS is especially important in the NIH’s biosafety laboratories, where scientists study diseases that are able to infect humans — and where the DOHS is tasked with not only protecting the NIH employees who work with dangerous pathogens, but with keeping infectious diseases from escaping the confines of the lab and infecting the general population.
“We were all there to work on ensuring that people were safe,” said one former DOHS employee who was terminated during the February cuts. “My worry would be that the quality of everything, the quality of the work that can be done on different projects and maintaining regulatory compliance and things like that, would decrease simply because there are fewer personnel.”
Workforce cuts could lead to a reduced capacity for training scientists in the techniques used to handle dangerous pathogens, said the former DOHS employee.
“If you’re not learning how to do those things safely from somebody who knows how to do them, I think it follows naturally that there’s a higher likelihood that an incident could occur,” said the former employee.
They added that everyday maintenance and upkeep could fall to the wayside if laboratory and safety staff are stretched too thin.
“I do think that there are things that could go unnoticed,” said the former employee.
Both Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and NIH director nominee Jay Bhattacharya have publicly raised concerns about the prospect of “lab leaks.” They have said that they would seek to restrict certain kinds of infectious disease research that can make viruses more infectious or harmful to humans because they believe such research makes a “lab leak” more likely. Many scientists say that so-called “gain-of-function” research is necessary for understanding viruses, and that such restrictions would likely have a chilling effect on infectious disease research as a whole.
Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University, used to be a member of the board of Biosafety Now, an organization that advocates for a ban on “gain-of-function” research. He resigned from the board after being nominated by Trump to lead the NIH. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is set to vote Thursday on whether to send Bhattacharya’s nomination to the full Senate.
Kennedy and Bhattacharya have also both claimed that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak caused by “gain-of-function” research at an infectious disease research institute in Wuhan, China. While the exact origins of the pandemic may be impossible to determine, most scientists believe it originated not from a lab, but from an animal at a Wuhan livestock market.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was considering signing an executive order that would ban “gain-of-function” research earlier this year.
“Haven’t we had enough of this dangerous research to produce more deadly viruses?” Kennedy wrote in a post on X in June 2024.
Kennedy, Bhattacharya and NIH did not respond to a request for comment.
Around 1,200 probationary employees were fired from the NIH in February. After a judge ruled that the terminations were illegal, the Office of Personnel Management walked back the directive. A few agencies have rehired some terminated employees. It’s not clear if DOHS has rehired any of its terminated staff.
The NIH maintains more than 300 buildings and employs more than 6,000 laboratory scientists among its 20,000 total employees. Its many research facilities include a number of biosafety laboratories which are rated according to a four-level system. The lowest rating, BSL-1, applies to labs that are only used to study microbes that aren’t known to cause disease in humans. The highest rating, BSL-4, is given to labs that use special design elements like air-supplied suits for personnel and air-locked doors to keep particularly dangerous and difficult-to-treat pathogens like Ebola from infecting the scientists who study them — and from escaping to the outside world.
The exact number of research labs run by NIH, and the proportion that operate under a high biosafety level, is unclear, but the agency employs more than 4,000 primary investigators across its main campus and the off-site research facilities it maintains. One such facility is the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick, which is one of the foremost infectious disease research laboratories in the world and studies everything from avian influenza to COVID-19 to hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.
DOHS’s job is to help mitigate and minimize the danger, said the former employee.
“‘Gain-of-function’ research has its risks, of course, but that’s why we’re here,” said the former DOHS employee.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.