OSHA is seeking to renew an information collection request (ICR) related to COVID-19 reporting and recordkeeping requirements for healthcare employees to ensure compliance with Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) mandates even as the agency has stopped enforcing the requirements and plans to withdraw them through a rulemaking.
March 16, 2025
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The Trump EPA is signaling plans to scale back Biden-era approaches for evaluating -- and thus regulating -- worker and other risks under TSCA, asking a federal appellate court to remand the so-called “framework” rule so that officials can reconsider it “in its entirety,” Nancy Beck, EPA’s newly appointed deputy chemicals chief, told the court.
A coalition of safety organizations is urging OSHA and employers to go beyond legal requirements and implement robust environmental, health and safety (EHS) practices, emphasizing that proactive risk mitigation not only enhances worker safety but also boosts productivity and contributes to economic growth.
Debra Lee, who has been serving as California OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) acting chief for the past eight months, told state lawmakers during her March 5 confirmation hearing that her priorities include aggressively working to hire new staff to fill a substantial number of vacancies and ensuring that a new program to protect agricultural workers becomes fully operational soon.
Senate Democrats are raising concerns over whether the Trump administration will provide adequate funding for OSHA, given prior Republican lawmakers’ attempts to slash the agency’s budget, pressing Keith Sonderling on the issue at his confirmation hearing to be Labor Department (DOL) deputy secretary.
The Trump EPA is indicating its plans to initiate a new rulemaking to reconsider the Biden administration’s Risk Management Program (RMP) final rule, voicing support for industry and GOP state efforts to put into abeyance their ongoing legal challenges to the Biden rule.
Several members of California OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) standards board and labor representatives are strongly criticizing a bill pending in Congress that would eliminate federal OSHA, charging such a move would be disastrous for workers across the country and weaken state protections even in states that have their own regulatory programs such as the Golden State.
Chemical distributors are urging the Labor Department to roll back two Biden-era OSHA regulations and drop plans for finalizing two proposed rules, arguing they impose excessive compliance costs without improving worker safety and meet the requirements in a recent executive order aimed at reducing regulatory burdens.
Chemical industry groups are suing to overturn the Biden EPA’s rejection of their petition to reconsider its 2024 Risk Management Program (RMP) rule, part of a multi-pronged push by industry groups to rescind the facility-safety regulation.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is retaining two EPA chemical assessment programs on its “high risk list” of programs susceptible to waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse, finding that its combined ratings of the programs that include assessments of chemical risks to workers remain “unchanged” from 2023.