Three years ago, one man saved my family and me. He knew nothing about us except that I was a journalist, that I had left Russia because of the war, that I had children, and that we had nowhere to go. Kyle and his wife Katie decided to take us in and give us shelter. We finally had a dot on the map where we were welcome. That was how we ended up in the United States, after traveling through five or six countries in the first three months of the war.
We still live in the house into which Kyle and Katie welcomed us. All these three years, I have felt the kind of care and involvement from them which you don’t normally expect from strangers. A few days after we arrived, Katie’s mom sent us a dinner consisting of food to which we were accustomed. And Kyle was always trying to help. He paid our utilities for a long time, and he gave my husband odd jobs.
Yesterday, Elon Musk fired Kyle and two hundred other employees at the research institute where they work.
“DOGE struck like a thief in the night. Too cowardly to fire us in person, virtually everyone at NIOSH learned they were laying us off via a summary overnight email,” Kyle writes on his Facebook page.
NIOSH is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which was established by Congress over fifty years ago. It researched health and safety hazards, recommended essential standards for occupational safety and health, and investigated workplace disease outbreaks. For many years, the Institute also monitored the health of 9/11 first responders and tracked occupational illnesses among firefighters and miners.
Kyle himself worked as pulmonary toxicologist at NIOSH. He studied the effects of inhaled toxicants on the lungs and other organs.
“Since 2017, I’ve studied the effects of micronized copper-treated lumber sawdust, Corian/alumina trihydrate, various 3D printer emissions, and, most recently, engineered stone dust. That last material, engineered stone, is currently responsible for a global outbreak of silicosis, a progressive and ultimately fatal lung disease. Truly a public health crisis with profound impacts on exposed workers,” Kyle writes in his post.
DOGE sent the institute’s employees a mass layoff notice at five a.m. Tuesday morning. The brief letter announced that NIOSH was being eliminated “to improve efficiency.”
“To be clear, nothing about these firings was efficient,” Kyle retorts. “This was not trimming the fat, or even a decimation, but a wholesale execution of the institute. Only a skeleton crew now remains, presumably to help sell off instruments and other assets before being fired themselves. Is it efficient to stop millions of dollars’ worth of studies in their tracks, never to be completed? The breadth of institutional knowledge lost is hard to fathom (not speaking of myself here; I have been lucky to be trained by true giants in the field). Were there inefficiencies at NIOSH? Of course, the same as with any large organization, and I would have been happy to see improvements in those areas. Unfortunately, the costs of what happened today will compound over the next several decades, yielding sick and dying workers—husbands, mothers, sons, and daughters. I hope it was worth it. For what? A billionaires’ tax break?
“Ultimately, I think I will be okay, although the prospect of job hunting in a field saturated with thousands of newly jobless scientists is daunting—especially as the current sole breadwinner and with a child on the way. What I know for certain is that somewhere today, a worker is being exposed to something that will eventually kill him, and there will be no one there to figure out why he died.”
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On April fifth, people all across the United States will take to the streets in protest. Despite Trump’s threats to deport all disloyal people “to their country of origin,” I will be there too. What is more, I will be at a protest rally helping the organizers as a volunteer. Americans have been good to me, so I cannot fade into the woodwork when their accomplishments are under attack and their world is crumbling. I will stand with those who are willing to defend their values.
Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 2 April 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader, who thanks the author for her kind permission to publish her text in translation on this website.