November 15, 2026

David LaRoss

David LaRoss joined Inside U.S. Trade as a senior editor in January 2025. He previously covered federal policy on environmental and workplace safety issues for Inside EPA and Inside OSHA.

Archived Articles

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has rejected the Center for Biological Diversity’s (CBD) long-running challenge aiming to limit or overturn the Congressional Review Act (CWA), finding Congress has broad discretion to scrap OSHA and other agencies’ rules with a streamlined voting process that limits judicial review.

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A federal district judge has rejected a long-pending suit over President Donald Trump’s 2017 executive order (EO) commanding agencies to balance out each new regulation they issue by identifying two existing rules for repeal, holding that the plaintiffs never identified a specific rule that was delayed or dropped because of the EO.

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A hazardous waste facility is urging EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) to scrap an agency-crafted Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) permit that includes OSHA worker safety requirements, arguing that EPA cannot force permittees to follow OSHA rules in RCRA permits.

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A staffing firm executive told House lawmakers at a recent hearing that the trend toward greater use of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace could bolster worker safety through a combination of new data-driven safeguards and shifting repetitive or weight-bearing tasks away from humans.

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OSHA in a new final rule is certifying two “quantitative fit” tests for ensuring respiratory equipment complies with its respiratory protection standard, giving employers new options that the agency says can be completed more than twice as quickly as prior methods and potentially enabling major time savings for firms with large workforces that use masks.

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EPA is claiming immunity from dozens of pending tort claims over its role in a 2015 wastewater spill because its employees went through OSHA’s training program for hazardous-waste handling, teeing up a district court ruling on how much training federal employees must receive to protect their agencies from liability should a disaster occur.

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Federal appeals court judges appeared doubtful at recent oral arguments of citizen groups’ suit aiming to revive Obama-era rules from OSHA and other agencies the GOP scrapped using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) in the early days of the Trump administration, questioning claims that the CRA is unconstitutional and the repeals were unlawful.

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A key House Democrat plans to introduce legislation to advance a progressive regulatory reform agenda that includes neutralizing “corporate capture” at OSHA and other agencies, aiming to start debate on a counterpoint to GOP and industry calls for regulatory reform bills that might hinder efforts to pursue novel regulatory policies.

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The Supreme Court’s decision faulting the Commerce Department for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census based on a “contrived” post hoc pretext could bolster lawsuits targeting the Trump OSHA’s rule rollbacks, such as the pending case over its recordkeeping rule, where challengers say officials ignored or misrepresented the record.

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The Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote has preserved the long-standing doctrine that mandates judicial deference to OSHA and other agencies’ “reasonable” readings of ambiguities in their rules, but the majority’s emphasis on the doctrine’s limits prompted conservative justices to warn the test has been so weakened it may as well be “zombified."

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