Hello and welcome. Alright, I’ve been looking forward to creating this video. As the owner of a safety consulting company, I’ve been very interested and even concerned to try to monitor and find out what’s going to happen with workplace health and safety regulations, OSHA in particular, given the new administration’s promises to reduce government and rollback regulation. Now that we’re about 30 days into the new administration, today is February 6th and we’ve got 30 days of information and new developments. I think it is probably worth taking a look at that and maybe trying to use that information to predict what’s going to happen in the future.
Also, not only from a consulting point of view, but I also used to own a small contracting company who was on the other side of the fence here. My company got inspected by osha. I failed. I had to pay that, pay those fines. I know what that feels like. I’ll talk more about that later.
But with that said, let me say that this is going to be a little bit informal. I wanted to get this video out, but I didn’t have two days to make it a perfectly polished video. Apologies for that, but I think it’s going to be a good information for those of you who are interested in this subject, and it’ll save you having to do all the research that I’ve done, all the thinking, all the analysis and so forth. So that said, let’s get started.
So I want to cover four different areas:
- Number one, I want to talk about what happened to OSHA under the last Trump administration.
- Then review what’s happened here in the first 30 days.
- Then try to address the big question, can OSHA be abolished? Right? We’re hearing all this talk about agencies being abolished. Is that even realistic?
- Then I’ll end off by trying to, based on what’s happened in the past and what’s happened in the last 30 days, try to give a prediction about what might happen in the future, and then just some closing thoughts about the whole thing. So let’s get started.
Review of What Happened with OSHA Under Last Trump Administration
So what happened under the last Trump administration? The headline there is not a lot, believe it or not.
Number one, no head of OSHA was ever seated. There was two different appointees, but neither one of them got approved, so the agency actually ran for four years without a leader. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before, but that’s what happened.
No new regulations were rolled out. No surprise there.
The agency shrunk as far as headcount because there were no new hires. The end result is that OSHA overall shrunk. There were less inspections, but believe me when I tell you that they kept on functioning. I mean, they kept on doing inspections. They kept on issuing fines and penalties during that time period. I thought there was going to be a huge reduction in work, but companies kept contacting us saying they got, talking about getting inspected, needed help fixing everything, building safety programs.
Also, during that time period, I and still do regularly, monitor enforcement activities because that’s public information and that discontinued. So that’s basically what happened during the first administration.
What’s Happened in the First 30 days That Could Impact OSHA?
Let’s go ahead and talk about what’s happened during the first 30 days of this administration. So first of all, the efforts that we’ve all heard about to reduce government and costs and headcount. So they’ve had the return to the office requirement, hiring freeze, the big severance offers that a lot of people have taken up and taken advantage of. Also, there’s been this attempt to reclassify government employees from standard W2 at will employees to what are called government appointees. And the big difference there is that government appointees serve at the pleasure of the administration. They can fire you for no reason. So they’re literally trying to reclassify, I guess, all employees as government appointees so they can just fire them. Of course, that’s facing all sorts of legal pushback. We’ll see how that goes.
So you add up that cumulative effect all across government, all the different agencies have seen a reduction in workforce, and of course that impacts OSHA too. That means less inspectors, less administrative staff and so forth. So no real surprise there.
The other big development has obviously been the new Department of Government Efficiency, “DOGE,” led by Elon Musk. So obviously that’s a big controversial thing that’s going on right now. We could talk about that for days. But anyway, we’ll just talk about how it’s impacting this issue. So really what I want to point out, as a lot of people know, Elon Musk is heavy into the manufacturing sector. He is got Tesla and the Boring company here in the Austin, Texas area, and of course he’s got SpaceX. Those are huge, massive operations, a lot of employees, and when you have that kind of scale, you’re going to run afoul of the agency.
So his companies have been cited by OSHA and fined and if my research is correct, his California facility was fined about $236,000. That’s Cal osha, but related. And then the Gigafactory here in Austin, I think got a $7,000 fine just at the end of last year.
So my point is, Elon Musk definitely knows who OSHA is. He’s felt the sting of their wrath, so to speak. So every time I turn on the TV or flip over my computer, I expect to see the headline: Elon Musk wants to abolish OSHA. We’ll get into that a minute. Whether that could happen or not. To be clear, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he targets the agency. That hasn’t happened yet. But again, that could happen by the end of the day. And if that does happen, I’ll be back with another video talking about that.
But so we’ll see how that happens. A highly controversial new agency and Elon Musk, who knows if he’ll even survive. We’ll have to see. Again, we’re only a month into this four year administration.
The other thing that’s really important and interesting is Trump’s appointee to be the Labor Secretary, to lead,the Department of Labor. OSHA obviously falls under the Department of Labor. It’s a lady named Laurie Chavez Remer, I hope I’m saying her name correctly. What’s really interesting about her is that according to my research, she’s very strong pro-union and even has the backing of the Teamsters Union. If my research is correct, and obviously labor unions at the top of their list of priorities is worker protections and worker rights. And at the top of that list is obviously workplace health and safety. So if she’s supporting labor unions, she has the support of a huge union like that, it’s hard to believe that she’s not going to be supportive of workplace health and safety at the federal level. It would be a real contradiction there for her to go against that. I don’t think she’s actually been approved yet, gone through that congressional approval process. I haven’t heard much about her being controversial or anything. So I assume she’s going to get approved and seated and we’ll have to keep an eye on that. But again, that’s an interesting wild card in my opinion, and I think that bodes well for the agency, but we’ll see how that goes.
Obviously, no new regulations, right? They’ve made that clear, and that sounds like a great thing. No new regulations, but in reality, it’s not that big of an impact. And let me explain what I mean by that. To put it in context, even for OSHA to put out a new regulation, it takes many, many years. You have to write the rule, which are complex rules, which are complex. You got to get industry feedback, you get pushback back and forth. It takes many years. So even in an active administration, you might get, I don’t know, three, four or five new regulations in the next four years. They were expected if the Biden administration had remained in office, three new main regulations were to come out. One was the Walk Around rule where a union rep could walk around with an OSHA inspector on behalf of the workers. That doesn’t impact a lot of employers, probably big employers care a lot more about that.
The other rule had to do with Emergency Response, but that was only going to really impact first responders like EMS. Again, not a big impact on employers.
The one that was kind of big was the new Heat Stress standard. The draft of that came out last year, and that was a very complicated regulation.
So anyway, those three probably would’ve been the only ones that have been shelved, at least for now. But again, not a huge impact as big as a lot of people might think.
Can Trump Abolish OSHA?
Okay, having said that, let’s move on to the big question here. Could Trump or Elon Musk abolish OSHA? Again, I wouldn’t be surprised if that statement came out, if that headline came out, but I just don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t think that could ever happen for several reasons. First of all, if my understanding is correct, it literally takes an act of Congress to abolish an agency. In other words, they would have to pass both houses of Congress to get passed and it’s hard to believe that that would happen. And the reason for that is workplace health and safety is it’s a sacred cow. Maybe that’s not the best term, but I mean, it’s a sacred thing, right? I think people understand, and support base of blue collar workers, and again, unions, they all know that if you abolish the health and safety agency, OSHA and the threat of inspections and the deterrence, then unfortunately a lot of companies are going to take shortcuts around safety. What does that lead to? That’s going to lead to more serious injuries and fatalities, and obviously nobody wants that.
So again, I just think it’s a real political hot potato, and I think it’d be deeply unpopular. I just have a hard time seeing a senator or a Congress person going back to their districts or state and saying, “Hey, let’s abolish all workplace health and safety regulations.” It’s just hard to believe that would happen.
Having said that, there’s a senator I believe in Arizona who tried to introduce a bill to abolish OSHA, i actually said that in the title of the bill, if I remember correctly, back in 2021, but it never really saw the light of day, but he is reintroduced it here in January. We’ll have to see where that goes. But even in his bill, he talks about abolishing the federal agency and bringing it back to the state. So a lot of states already have their own state OSHA programs, Cal-OSHA being the most famous. So even if the federal level was abolished, it’d come back to the states. They would have to create their own state plan. And I think if that happened, they would refer back to the federal regulations rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and make companies figure out a whole new set of regulations. So even if that did happen, I think it would come back to the states.
The other thing, again, like I talked about before, there’d be a lot of legal pushback, a lot of legal fighting, and those fights can literally last for many years, definitely probably longer than this administration. And while that legal battle was being waged in the background, the agency would keep functioning. They’d keep on doing inspections, issuing fines to the companies, and I don’t think that would change.
My Predictions About OSHA Under Trump
Alright, so let’s begin to wrap up and I’ll give you my best prediction and best guess of what’s going to happen here for the next four years, and then give you some closing thoughts. As far as predictions. I think the headline, like I talked about before, I don’t think much is going to change in reality. I think it’s going to be a lot like the first Trump administration where OSHA, yes, it’s shrunk, less people, less capacity, less resources, no new regulations. But I believe that they’re going to keep functioning. They’re going to keep doing inspections, issuing citations. That deterrence effect is going to have a big effect on employers so that they do the right thing and try to maintain the safety programs. I really believe that, of course, I could be completely wrong about that. I’ll be carefully monitoring everything, and if anything changes, I’ll get back to you.
But for all the reasons I just got done talking about, I really think that at the end of the day, the agency’s going to survive and they’re going to keep doing what they do. I really believe that. We’ll see what happens. Like I said, that could change by the end of the day. We’ll see how that goes.
Closing Thoughts
Some other thoughts here, big picture thoughts. Lemme start off by saying that I think it’s important at this point in time, given all these circumstances, to refocus and remember why safety programs are important. When a company builds a safety program, they’re doing it for the right reason. Typically, they’re not doing it to dodge an OSHA inspector. Clearly that could be part of the objective. But companies build safety programs to protect their most valuable asset, their employees and their companies from harm. Nobody wants their employees to get hurt, or God forbid, killed, and deal with all that guilt and all the terrible things that come with it.
And so I think a lot of that underlying purpose of a safety program is what people should be focusing on and thinking about right now, not the agency and whether it’s going to be abolished and all these kinds of things.
Keep your eyes on what’s really important, other things to consider and important reminders. It’s not just about inspections and fines and penalties. There’s a lot of other major risks and liabilities that companies face when they’re not managing safety. So for example, if an employee is killed, and it could be proven that there was negligence, a company’s at risk for a personal injury lawsuit, a civil lawsuit. If you have a safety program, that’s your first line of defense, your best line of defense. If you don’t have one, you’re really exposed to settlements that can run into the millions of dollars.
Besides that risk, there’s a lot of other penalties that companies pay for. Not managing safety lost business opportunities, increased insurance costs, increased costs, overall damage to the company’s reputation, increased employee turnover. Employees want to work for safe companies and safe workplaces. If your workplace isn’t safe, you’re going to have turnover problems. So look at the big picture value proposition, I guess, and forget about all of this noise.
The other thing that’s really important to understand is the political pendulum swings hard in election cycles. In other words, oftentimes the incumbent administration doesn’t win reelection. Obviously that doesn’t always happen, but keep in mind that there’s always a possibility and risk of the Democrats coming back into power. If they do, I promise you that if anything does happen to impact OSHA, they’re going to quickly erase that.
To give you an idea of what that looks like and why I say that, if my research is correct, president Biden, after he was inaugurated on the same day, he appointed the head of OSHA.
So at the top of any Democratic administration is workplace health and safety, I promise you. And they’re going to put a focus on that. They’re going to erase anything that the previous administration had done to damage the agency.
And the other point there is, anyone who’s running a safety program knows that you can’t flip the “on and off” switch with a safety program. It takes a lot of momentum, a lot of commitment. You have to build a culture safety across your organization from frontline employees, supervisors, management, leadership. Again, you can’t flip those things on and off. You turn off your safety program, and a new administration comes in, boy, you’re going to have to start from scratch. You don’t want to do that. So that’s yet another argument and risks that you want to think about in these times and in these circumstances.
I Understand How Challenging it is to Manage Safety as a Business Owner
And the last point I want to make, the last thing I want to say is I don’t mean to sound preachy. I don’t want to sound like a safety consultant coming at you from an Ivory Tower preaching and pointing fingers. Like I mentioned, before starting this company, I had an energy services company that got a surprise inspection from OSHA. We failed the inspection and got cited. I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget writing that check to the US Department of Treasury. You don’t write the check to OSHA, you write it to the US Department of Treasury. I’ll never forget that day. It was very humbling. And when that happened to me, I wasn’t mad at the agency. I wasn’t angry at the agency. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know about the regulation and I wasn’t keeping up. And even more than that, I think ashamed is a better word, that I had unnecessarily put my employees at risk by not keeping up.
So the upside of that is that it was a wake up call, believe me, I was always trying. I was always doing my best. I just didn’t know everything. But it got me back on track, got the safety program up to snuff and ended up being a positive experience for me. So I guess my point is, my perspective on this, everything I’ve talked about today is from both sides. Yes, I’m a safety consultant today. I own a consulting company, but I also see it from the viewpoint of a business owner understanding all the challenges that especially small companies face when they’re trying to keep up with these regulations. Before starting this company, I saw so many other companies pay the price for the same struggle that I went through with big citations, I saw a client go to jail, I saw others threatened with jail time.
All these bad things that can happen to especially small companies when they try to keep up with these regulations. So again, my perspective is from both sides of the fence. Those experiences are what really motivated me to start this company, to make compliance and safety accessible and possible for small companies. And that’s our mission. That’s what my team and I get up every morning to do. So I just wanted to point that out. It’s a balanced perspective that I’m trying to bring here.
Alright, with that said, I’ll go ahead and end off, if you liked what you heard, even if you didn’t, go ahead, hit that like button. Subscribe to our channel, hit that notifications bell and you’ll be notified every time I upload new content about environmental health and safety issues that impact small manufacturers. If you want to leave any comments, please do that and I’ll try to respond. Like I said before, I’ll carefully monitor this. If there’s any big changes, I’ll probably come back and post new content about this subject. Thanks for watching. See you next time.
