As part of creating a new pesticide sprayer with a more targeted spray, designers tested its effectiveness of application, but not for the potential impact that smaller droplets might have on farmworkers’ health. The University of Washington program that stepped in to analyze those risks faces steep cuts to its federal funding along with other workplace safety research.
Proposed cuts to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the research arm of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, threaten to close three research centers in Washington tasked with keeping safe workers in the state’s most dangerous jobs and training the next generation of safety experts.
Two of the centers operate out of the University of Washington. The cuts will also impact the Spokane Research Laboratory and the state’s occupational illness tracking.
First funded by NIOSH in 1977, UW’s Northwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety prepares graduate students for occupational health and safety roles and offers continuing education to current professionals. It’s one of 18 NIOSH education and research centers across the country.
“We are part of that vital pipeline,” said assistant professor Marissa Baker, deputy director of NWCOHS. “If you have fewer trained professionals to protect workers and to develop health and safety programs and plans, you’re going to have more workers who are getting injured and made ill at work.”
The Center’s $1.8 million in yearly NIOSH funding was recently set to end June 30. Baker explained the money supports 20-25 graduate students and provides professional continuing education or training to about 4,000 professionals each year.
Baker said she now believes just one more year of funding is coming. The federal government has sent a notice of allocation for this year’s grant money, she said, but the university is still waiting for the actual funding to cover July 2025 to June 2026.
“We’re expecting it, but things change quickly. … It used to be that if you received word of a federal grant, [the university] would let you spend on that promise,” Baker added. “We’re no longer allowed to spend on promises. We can only spend when money is in hand.”
The future of UW’s Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center also remains uncertain. NIOSH has funded that center for nearly three decades. Its yearly grant renewal comes up Sept. 29, and Elena Austin, the Center’s incoming director, said she does not know what will happen after that.
“There’s been an incredible lack of communication,” she said, “and the communication we do get is almost always oral communication and is not very specific, and that may or may not apply to our grant.”
Austin said there has been no communication from the federal government since the grant renewal documents were submitted in February.
The UW ag safety center is one of a dozen Centers for Agricultural Safety and Health around the country. The center at UW focuses on the farming, fishing and logging industries. It received $1.5 million from NIOSH last year.
Austin predicted jobs in these industries will get more dangerous if the center closes.
“It’s at once dangerous work, but it’s also an area of employment where the work practices are actually changing quite rapidly,” Austin said. “Although many technologies can improve the health and safety of workers, often they’re not designed in partnership with occupational health and safety professionals.”
Recent projects of the Center include translating pesticide labels into languages other than English and researching heat related-illnesses.
Austin said a NIOSH representative recently told regional directors that there would be a reduction in federal staff who manage the grants, creating an expected backlog in approvals.
“For us to not have a disruption in funding, we obviously need the award, the notice of award, to be sent prior to this year expiring,” Austin said.
In Spokane, workers at NIOSH’s Spokane Research Laboratory are on administrative leave with the option to come into the office, according to AFGE Local 1916 President Lilas Soukup.
“We are continuing to fight to have the employees maintain their positions,” Soukup wrote in an email. “Mining safety is important, especially with the Administration’s emphasis on utilizing coal.”
NIOSH lost the majority of its workers during the Department of Government Efficiency’s purge earlier this year. Pushback from lawmakers and unions, and a federal lawsuit, have brought back several hundred employees at centers in West Virginia, Ohio and the East Coast.
The Washington Department of Labor & Industries also expects to lose its NIOSH funding next June, according to agency spokesperson Matt Ross. L&I receives about $440,000 in NIOSH funding annually, using it to track trends of respiratory diseases like silicosis and perform analysis of workplace fatalities.
“The loss of NIOSH money is a significant blow — without further extension or alternate sources of funding, we’re likely to have to either scale back or stop doing this work,” Ross wrote in an email. “It will have a real impact on workplace safety, with less publicly available information on what causes injuries on the job and what we can do to stop them from happening.”
