The past four months of President Donald Trump’s second term have been a whirlwind of bad news. The far-right lackeys with whom he’s staffed his administration have been trying to defund, dismantle, or outright demolish necessary government programs and entire agencies at breakneck speed. That’s without even getting into the escalating economic crisis brought on by his tariff push, the rampant attacks on LGBTQ rights and pro-Palestinian voices, or the general chaos sown by tech oligarch Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” It’s a lot — and on top of all of that, rent is still due, healthcare still costs an arm and a leg, and we still have to go to work.
Now, thanks to the anti-worker, anti-regulatory actions Trump and his enablers in Congress are forcing through, our jobs may become even more dangerous. That’s very bad news in a country where a worker died on the job every 99 minutes in 2023.
You may have seen various Republican politicians crowing about cutting what they love to refer to as “burdensome” regulations, and sneering at what their conference dubbed a “one-size-fits-all regulatory agenda,” as House Republicans did in a May 15 hearing dubbed “Reclaiming OSHA’s Mission: Ensuring Safety Without Overreach.” OSHA — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — has long been a favorite target for conservatives, and now that they’ve taken the reins, it’s clear that they plan to move forward with hobbling the chronically understaffed, underfunded agency. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a DC-based think tank, in the first three months since Trump assumed office, his administration has shut down nearly a dozen OSHA offices in states with some of the highest workplace fatality rates like Louisiana and Alabama; attempted to close 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) offices in the epicenter of the black lung epidemic; and tried to shutter the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which conducts critical research into workplace injuries and illnesses, laying off hundreds of workers in the process.
Not all of these actions have been successful (more on that later) but the very fact that Trump and his associates feel emboldened to attack worker safety so brazenly sets a frightening precedent. Worse, Trump’s proposed budget for 2026 includes even more budget and staffing cuts to OSHA, MSHA, and NIOSH, which would only make it more difficult for those agencies to fulfil their mission of keeping the country’s workers safe. The plan would get rid of the Chemical Safety Board and cut 80% of NIOSH’s budget, essentially shuttering the country’s only research agency focused on worker health, while OSHA cuts would mean almost 30% fewer workplace inspections next year—a serious problem. As former OSHA official and workplace safety expert Jordan Barab noted, under the 2025 budget, 'if OSHA were to inspect each workplace in the country just once, it would take 185 years.” How much worse can it get? We may find out next year.
Despite conservative whining about agency “overreach,” OSHA’s job is simple: since its creation as a regulatory agency inside the Department of Labor in 1970, it has focused on setting and enforcing workplace safety standards. It’s hard work, but it matters: the AFL-CIO’s 2025 edition of their annual report, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, estimates that OSHA has saved the lives of more than 712,000 workers since the agency’s creation. The country’s fatal injury rate has continued to decrease over the past three years, as has the rate of work-related injuries and illnesses; those numbers are still far too high, but that downward trend has certainly been good news for the working class.
“Far fewer workers are dying today of asbestos-related disease, or diseases caused by exposure to lead or formaldehyde because of OSHA standards,” Barab, who served as OSHA’s Deputy Assistant Secretary during the Obama Administration, testified during the May 15 hearing. “Cotton dust deaths were virtually eliminated following issuance of the cotton dust standard…. Fewer workers fall to their deaths from buildings or get their limbs crushed in machinery…. Work-related hepatitis B deaths have been virtually eliminated since issuance of OSHA’s bloodborne pathogens standard. And I could go on and on.”
As Barab illustrated, OSHA’s standards cover a wide range of industries, from coal mining to commercial diving, and exist to protect workers from occupational hazards and accidents; the more dangerous a workplace is, the more safety regulations are needed. Take construction as an example. The worker fatality rate there is nearly triple the national average, so the long list of OSHA regulations that try to protect construction workers from building collapses, head injuries, chemical exposures, electrocution, and more makes a lot of sense — unless you’re a Republican lawmaker, I guess.
It can take a long time to make even necessary changes or updates to the agency’s standards (especially when you’re ping-ponging between anti-labor presidential administrations) but in recent years, coalitions of workers, labor unions, public health experts, and scientists have pushed for the inclusion of two new major standards. One deals with outside heat, and the other concerns deadly respirable dust underground. (Wouldn’t you know it, Republicans have strongly opposed both! Remember when they tried to rebrand as the pro-worker party? You’ve almost got to laugh).
As the climate crisis continues to worsen, spiking temperatures have impacted millions of workers whose jobs compel them to spend their days outside. Extreme heat can be life-threatening for those who work in fields picking vegetables beneath the punishing Florida and California sun, for example, or on the tarmac at airports in Texas, or on roofs and construction sites in Arizona, or inside an oil refinery in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” We all know it’s getting hotter, and not everyone has the option to work in a climate-controlled place. OSHA’s lack of a federal heat standard has long been a critical oversight, and in 2024 — following years of advocacy from workers and their advocates — the Biden administration announced a new proposed rule intended to protect 36 million workers from extreme heat on the job.
Unfortunately, that announcement came near the end of Biden’s term, and now, its future is uncertain. As The Lever has reported, Trump’s nominee to lead OSHA, David Keeling, is a former executive at Amazon and UPS — two companies that have faced a number of labor complaints, including multiple citations from OSHA for heat exposure injuries and deaths that occurred amid heat (both companies deny that said deaths were heat-related). UPS has also joined big-business corporations in lobbying against the proposed heat standard.
Underground, workers are spared the heat of the sun’s rays, but temperatures can still rise to dangerously high levels. While a federal heat standard specifically for coal miners would undoubtedly be a welcome addition, there’s an even deadlier risk waiting for them each time they take that long, dark trip down into the mine. In Appalachia, where the coal seams have been mined for centuries, miners now have to work long hours cutting through more and more rock — and that rock is packed with crystalline silica, a substance 20 times more toxic to humans than coal dust. Silica causes an enormous amount of damage to the lungs, and is the primary factor driving the current surge in black lung disease. The progressive, incurable pulmonary illness now affects 1 in 5 longtime coal miners in Central Appalachia, and its most severe form, progressive massive fibrosis, is killing young currently-working miners.
NIOSH first recognized the danger of respirable silica dust in 1974, but it took decades of fighting to finally get a new MSHA standard on the books. In April 2024, the miners finally won — but unfortunately, the Trump administration, buoyed by continued support from Republican politicians, stepped in just days before the rule was scheduled to take effect. They announced that the rule’s enforcement would be “paused” until August. Four months may not seem like much time, but that’s four more months in which thousands of workers will be exposed to poisonous dust, and four more months of irreparable harm to their lungs.
Both the heat stress standard and the silica dust standard, if implemented and enforced, would ultimately save millions of workers from illness, injury, and death. It’s difficult to understand why anyone would oppose them, but the Trump administration has spent the past four months making it clear just how little it cares about workers’ lives, let alone their safety. And in keeping with Trump’s vicious crusade against the most vulnerable members of American society, attacks like these on worker safety will continue to disproportionately affect the most marginalized. The Economic Policy Institute has found that older workers, immigrant workers, Black workers, and Latino workers are at the highest risk, noting that in 2023, “67% of those killed on the job were immigrants. Black and Latino workers are more likely to die on the job, with Latino workers having the highest workplace fatality rate.”
Things aren’t looking great, but it’s important to remember that we’ve been here before. Even if Trump succeeds in cutting OSHA off at the knees and weakening what’s left of our existing worker safety protections, the working class is still in a better position than we were before OSHA existed. That's not because of slow-moving government actions or benevolent politicians; it’s because workers organized, and fought, and stood together in the face of forces that sought to divide them. We are the reason those laws and standards exist; no one in a wood-paneled office in D.C. granted them to us out of the goodness of their hearts. Strong unions, worker-led organizations, community bonds and mutual aid groups are the only reasons we made it through the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age and the Great Depression and all of the crises that came after them. That’s how we'll make it through this one, too: together.
