Trump Administration Guts World Trade Center Health Program

Advocates for first responders and 9/11 survivors denounced the Trump administration’s gutting last week of the agency overseeing the World Trade Center Health Program, with one prominent supporter of first responders calling the cuts “unpatriotic.”

Dr. John Howard, the program's administrator and the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, was among those fired as part of the Trump administration’s larger personnel and funding cuts across the federal government. After pressure from advocates and labor unions, Dr. Howard was rehired over the weekend, but other cuts, including the firing of more than a dozen WTCHP staffers, have yet to be reversed. Among them are doctors who under federal law are the only health officials who can certify 9/11 survivors’ illnesses, causing fear that survivors who develop cancer in the coming months won’t be able to join the program and receive needed health care.  

“This will have serious consequences that will create a snowball effect and will be detrimental to the 9/11 community, and it's going to recklessly hurt people,” said John Feal, a staunch advocate for survivors of the terror attacks and founder of the FealGood Foundation. “This is malicious. It’s incompetence and it’s being done by people who don’t know how to run the federal government." Read more in The Chief-Leader.