After a chemical leak at the Ames Goldsmith plant in Kanawha County killed two workers and injured dozens more last month, federal investigators quickly arrived in West Virginia to begin piecing together what went wrong.

Now, the federal agency tasked with determining the root cause of the accident could be eliminated.

President Trump is proposing to cut funding for the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, a small federal agency that probes chemical disasters and pushes for safety fixes.

Worker advocates and former CSB members warn dismantling the agency could leave states like West Virginia — with long histories of deadly industrial chemical incidents — more vulnerable to future disasters.

The board has opened investigations into eight chemical incidents in West Virginia since 2008.

Maya Nye, federal policy director for the environmental health organization Coming Clean, said before the most recent chemical leak at the Ames Goldsmith plant, the 2008 explosion at the Bayer Crop Science plant in Institute was the deadliest in her recent memory. Two workers were killed in that incident as well.

“These can be prevented,” she said. “Every incident that occurs is 100% preventable.”

Many of the state’s chemical facilities are concentrated along the Kanawha Valley’s industrial corridor.

Those incidents include a toxic release at DuPont’s Belle plant in 2010 that killed a worker. And in 2014, a spill at Freedom Industries tainted the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people.

Advocates say the impacts of chemical incidents often extend far beyond plant workers.

Nye said low-income communities and communities of color often face the greatest risks. But the employees stand to lose the most.

“Workers are typically hurt first and worst,” she said.

Why the Chemical Safety Board matters

The White House said the CSB duplicates work already done by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and argued that eliminating it would help shrink the federal government.

But Congress created the board after growing frustration that existing federal agencies were not adequately investigating major industrial chemical disasters.

The safety board was created through amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990, and has a budget of around $14 million and fewer than 50 employees. It was modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates airplane and train crashes.

Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary at OSHA, said the CSB investigates industrial chemical incidents differently than enforcement agencies.

While OSHA and the EPA primarily determine whether companies violated existing regulations, Barab said the board conducts broader “root cause” investigations into why disasters happened in the first place.

“They can look at other problems, other causes that aren’t necessarily covered by regulations or standards,” he said.

The CSB can unearth problems like worker fatigue, lack of routine maintenance, management changes and broader safety culture problems inside facilities, he said.

After the release of toxic chemicals at DuPont’s Belle plant in 2010, board investigators determined that a lack of planning and a lack of communication between plant operators, as well as deferred maintenance, had caused the leak.

The CSB has issued more than 1,000 recommendations over its history, many of which were later adopted by companies, trade associations and state regulators.

“A lot of the ways the industry has modernized to improve safety are based on recommendations that came out of the CSB,” Barab said.

The board has also publicly criticized recent efforts by the Trump administration to roll back chemical safety regulations known as Risk Management Program rules.

Earlier this year, the board warned the rollback would represent “a significant step backwards” in preventing catastrophic chemical accidents.

Trump proposes cuts to multiple worker protection agencies

The Trump administration has proposed eliminating the board multiple times in the past.

Rick Engler, a former CSB member appointed by President Barack Obama, said Congress has repeatedly rejected past attempts to eliminate the agency.

Despite its size, Engler said eliminating the board would leave a major gap in federal chemical safety oversight.

“It’s a very small agency,” he said. “But without the CSB, preventative solutions will not be identified.”

Kelly Moore, a spokesperson for Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said the senator has long supported the CSB and voted in the past to support additional funding for the agency.

Moore did not answer if Capito would support President Trump’s cuts this year.

The potential loss of the agency comes as federal workplace safety agencies already face staffing shortages and proposed budget cuts.

The Trump administration has proposed cuts to other agencies that protect workers. He proposed a 7.5% cut to OSHA’s budget and a 10% cut to the federal mine safety agency’s budget.

Barab said the administration’s push to eliminate the agency is especially puzzling because the board largely provides the kind of safety guidance and recommendations that Trump officials have said they prefer over aggressive enforcement.

“It’s ironic,” he said, “that they should try to kill an agency that actually does exactly that.”

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This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration proposed 25% tariffs on imports from Brazilcharging that the world’s 10th-biggest economy engages in trade practices that are “unreasonable’’ and that “burden or restrict U.S. commerce.’’

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he received the decision “with indignation.” He also blamed the decision by the U.S. administration on his rival in October’s elections, Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, who visited Washington last week. The senator is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, once nicknamed “the Trump of the Tropics” by his allies.

The announcement late Monday came after an investigation by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, charging Brazil with lax anti-corruption enforcement and unfair tariffs of its own, among other things.

The U.S. has had a goods trade surplus with Brazil for years.

U.S Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that he and President Donald Trump had “constructive’’ meetings with Lula and other Brazilian officials. But he said that “we continue to have substantial differences in resolving the issues identified in this investigation.’’

Lula on Tuesday cited other reasons for the punishing tariff proposal. For the first time he named an American official as a hurdle to his relations with Trump and once again he threatened to retaliate.

“I spoke to President Trump for three hours, and that Marco Rubio guy, the head of the State Department, he is anti-Latin American,” Lula said. “He is a deadly enemy of Cuba, a deadly enemy of many Latin American countries. I already told Trump that he does not like Brazil.”

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond a request for comment from The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Brazil’s government said in a statement that its dialogue with American counterparts, which includes “personal involvement of Presidents Lula and Trump,” is being ”sabotaged by merely electoral and family matters” of the Bolsonaros.

It added that it hopes “the recommendations do not become effective tariffs.”

“But we stress we will adopt every measure that is capable of reducing the damage that might be caused to the national economy, to the jobs and the income of Brazilians,” the country’s government said.

Last year, Trump had slapped Brazil with a 50% tariff, mainly to protest its prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro for trying to overturn his electoral defeat in 2022. Trump’s relationship with Lula seemed to have improved early May, when the Brazilian visited the White House.

But last week, the Trump administration designated two Brazilian gangs as terrorist organizationsafter Sen. Bolsonaro’s visit. Lula opposes the designation, which analysts say could bolster his political rival.

Sen. Bolsonaro published in his social media channels a statement he said he sent to Rubio, in which he criticizes the potential new tariff hike for it would cause “serious damages to the Brazilian people — precisely the citizens that see the United States as a partner and a friend.”

“I am writing to formally repeat the request I did to you in person, that the U.S. do not impose tariffs on Brazil,” Sen. Bolsonaro said.

Greer’s office has scheduled a public hearing July 6 on the proposed tariffs.

Trade lawyer Ryan Majerus, a partner at King & Spalding, noted said that the administration’s plan excludes more than half of U.S. imports from Brazil, including aircraft and key minerals.

The Trump administration invoked Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to launch the investigation into Brazil’s trade practices.

Sen. Bolsonaro travelled to meet officials in Washington last week in the wake of a scandal at home in which he admitted receiving funds from a disgraced banker. Another son, former lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, was also present.

On Tuesday, Trump posted a photo of the Bolsonaros in the Oval office on his social media site.

“These sons of Bolsonaro can be worse than him. They are actually sellouts of our country, they went there to ask a foreign nation to meddle in Brazilian affairs,” Lula said in a speech to residents of the city of Catalao, south of capital Brasilia. “They are traitors.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in February that Trump overstepped his authority by using a different law – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 – to impose sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners, including Brazil.

However, Section 301 tariffs have survived legal challenges, and the administration is likely to use that authority to impose other tariffs and to recoup some of the tax revenue lost when the Supreme Court rejected the IEEPA tariffs.

Brazil’s president said that during his visit to Washington early May, he handed Trump documents showing that the U.S. has a trade surplus with Brazil.

Documents published by the U.S. Trade Representative show that last year, U.S. exports to Brazil rose nearly 11% to $54.4 billion. Brazilian exports to the U.S. fell 5.7% to $39.9 billion, meaning the U.S. had a trade surplus of more than $14 billion.

The trade imbalance for services is more lopsided in favor of the U.S., with services exports in 2024 reaching $29.6 billion, quadruple the Brazilian services exports to the U.S.

“I am not going to cry about it,” Lula said. “If they (the U.S.) don’t want to buy from us, we will sell to someone else.”

China has been Brazil’s biggest trading partner for about a decade.

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Mauricio Savarese reported from Sao Paulo.