"Reclaiming OSHA's Mission: Ensuring Safety Without Overreach"
House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections
2025-05-15
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Source: Congress.gov
Participants
Transcript
This subcommittee on workforce protections will come to order. I note that a quorum is present. Without objection, the chair is authorized to call a recess at any time. Today's hearing will review the occupational safety and health administration's activity under the previous administration and will also explore common sense solutions that can return OSHA to fulfilling its purpose of advancing workplace safety. OSHA's mission is to ensure the hardworking men and women of this nation are given safe and healthy working conditions. The agency fulfills this mission by setting and enforcing safety standards and by providing education, outreach, and compliance assistance to both employers and employees. When necessary, OSHA's enforcement efforts include monetary and even criminal penalties, all with the goal of protecting workers. That mission is critically important. However, in recent years, we've seen a regulatory approach that in many cases may have gone beyond OSHA's statutory authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. While these actions may have been well-intentioned, they often created confusion or imposed overly broad mandates that didn't meet the realities of the industries affected, especially for small businesses. For example, OSHA's attempt to implement a nationwide COVID vaccine mandate, later struck down by the US Supreme Court, raised serious concerns about federal overreach. In 2024, the agency issued a worker walk around rule, which opened the door to third party individuals, even those without workplace safety backgrounds, entering job sites to do safety inspections. And the proposed heat standard, while addressing a real concern, takes a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to account for a wide range of conditions and different industries and regions. We've also seen an expansion of enforcement tools, such as the severe violator enforcement program and the instance-by-instance citation policy that may reflect a view of employers as adversaries rather than partners in workplace safety.
That's a misguided perspective. Obviously, small businesses succeed when their employees succeed, and most of their employers take workplace safety very seriously. OSHA's mission is too important to be undermined by overreach. As the nature of work continues to change, broad-based regulatory efforts can unintentionally create more problems than they solve. That's why today's conversation is so critically important. For instance, this tree care industry has petitioned for the creation of a federal tree care standard for nearly two decades. This is one of the most dangerous industries in the nation, but workers currently rely on a patchwork of standards that do not adequately address the unique challenges of the work being performed. Similarly, because of technological advances with equipment and machinery, OSHA should update its 35-year-old standard on the control of hazardous energy, otherwise known as the lockout-tagout standard. While we saw progress on both fronts under the first Trump administration, now is the time to push for these solutions to be resolved. Republicans under this American economy and this administration, we know that America flourishes when workers flourish. I look forward to the hearing for today's witnesses so that they can bring about their knowledge and share with us what can be improved from the past four years, the lessons that we've learned, and how we can keep OSHA focused on its core mission of keeping America's workers safe. With that, I yield to my ranking member for an opening statement. Thank you, Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses for your testimony today.
Over the past hundred days, President Trump and his administration have decimated the very agencies and resources that have kept workers safe and healthy. Now, committee Republicans are following suit by holding this hearing to attack the work of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. We should all be able to recognize a basic truth. No job should ever be a death sentence. Workers deserve to come home to their families at the end of the day, not in pain, not in fear, but alive and well. To protect that fundamental right, Congress passed landmark safety laws and established important agencies like OSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. But all of these three agencies have been chronically underfunded since their inception. And largely because of that, they have long struggled to robustly defend workers from preventable injuries, illnesses, and death at work. In the 54 years since it was established, OSHA has made great strides, but it remains hamstrung by an overly complicated regulatory process, persistent underfunding, and the long uphill battle of updating standards to reflect scientific advances. Despite these constraints, OSHA took action during the Biden administration and proposed common sense safeguards, like the heat stress rule, to prevent tragedies in the workplace. Rather than build on that progress, the Trump administration is now threatening to dismantle any government program or agency that prioritizes workers' health and protects workers on the job. At one point, Doge targeted at least 11 OSHA field offices to be permanently shut down, including the only office in Louisiana, located in what is known as Cancer Alley,
due to the presence of over 200 chemical plants and the high rates of cancer in the area. MSHA has at least 30 field offices slated for closure on DOGE's hit list, including an office created in response to the upper big branch mine disaster. And while we face a surge in child labor violations, DOGE is still cutting staff and planning to close 20 wage and hour division offices. Shutting down field offices will endanger workers' lives by cutting off the public from DOL's most vital services. This also means severely limiting the geographic coverage of inspectors and investigators, enforcement activities against law-breaking companies, and further restraining an already resource-strapped DOL. And it doesn't stop here. On April 1st, nearly the entire NIOSH workforce was placed on leave with the promise of being fired later this summer by HHS Secretary Kennedy. In one sweeping move, Secretary Kennedy put 50 years of scientific expertise and public health research at risk. Doge kicked out NIOSH staffers, paid them to not work, and then after realizing that effectively eliminating NIOSH was a mistake, the Trump administration started to reverse course and rehired only some of those staff.
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