Daily News

Republican leaders on the House homeland security committee are backing a bill to reauthorize the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program into 2025, just weeks ahead of its expiration on July 27, even as a bipartisan Senate coalition is seeking a five-year extension instead.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) will publish its long-awaited proposed update to its 50-year-old standards for silica dust in the July 13 Federal Register, starting a 45-day public comment period and setting dates for two in-person public hearings.

Trade groups and chemical firms used recent meetings with White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials to raise in-depth scientific critiques of the occupational exposure limit EPA floated last year for carbon tetrachloride (CCl4 or CTC), just days before OMB cleared the agency to propose a TSCA risk management rule for the solvent.

The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) has issued a new report urging OSHA to craft a “comprehensive outreach plan” to improve employers’ handling of explosive chemicals and reactive hazards, as well as renewing long-standing calls to tighten safety standards for those substances, following a 2020 explosion that killed a worker.

Correction Appended

President Joe Biden has nominated former Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) member Amanda Wood Laihow to return to the board, months after she quietly stepped down in April at the conclusion of her first term -- leaving OSHRC with just a single Senate-confirmed member, short of the two-person quorum it needs to do business.

EPA officials are hoping to sign an agreement with OSHA ahead of final action on their slate of pending TSCA chemical-safety rules that would set terms for the two agencies to coordinate on enforcement of the toxics program’s planned workplace protections, including exposure limits that observers say EPA would struggle to implement on its own.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has proposed a long-awaited update to its 50-year-old standards for silica dust, advancing a rulemaking process that has been in progress for many years but hit repeated delays over the intervening years, despite OSHA enacting a parallel update to its own silica rules in 2016.

EPA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) says the former chair of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), who was the board’s only member for over a year, violated spending rules, potentially bolstering Biden appointees’ rollback of policies she enacted giving the CSB chair new unilateral authority including on certain spending decisions.

A California lawmaker says he will exempt small businesses from his controversial bill to accelerate development of workplace violence prevention and management standards for the state’s non-healthcare businesses and public agencies following strong opposition from employers, but the change is not expected to ease those groups’ objections.

OSHA is touting a new two-year agreement that it signed last week with an alliance of trade organizations, employers and unions to bolster outreach and education measures for trenching and excavation safety further boosting the agency’s emphasis on those protections after it ramped up inspections last year in response to a rise in accidents and deaths.

An industry attorney says EPA’s TSCA program appears poised to “supersede” and even “replace” OSHA as the primary regulator of workplace chemical exposures, pointing to both the precedent set by the toxics program’s proposal on methylene chloride and broad statutory language that he argues goes much further than the OSH Act.

An industry attorney says EPA has used recent TSCA risk management proposals to translate “unreasonable risk” -- a key term in the statute that neither Congress nor the agency has defined -- into strict workplace exposure limits, creating for the first time a “bright line” standard that employers and others could question in comments on the new rules.

Republican and Democratic leaders on the Senate’s environment and homeland security committees are floating a bill to reauthorize the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program into 2028 with no statutory changes, drawing support from industry groups who have urged Congress to act quickly before the program expires on July 27.

OSHA is formally asking representatives of small businesses and government entities to weigh in on its development of a long-awaited nationwide standard for heat danger, through a Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) process it plans to hold in the coming months -- a major step toward release of a formal proposal.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is urging OSHA to craft a safety standard for meat and poultry workers that would cover infectious disease in a new report that says the agency’s “continuing challenges” in the sector have been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic, and that it “missed opportunities” to collaborate with other authorities to address them.

Stakeholders on both sides are raising doubts on worker safeguards in EPA’s newly proposed TSCA rule for perchloroethylene (PCE), with one environmentalist querying its focus on protective gear over engineering controls while trade groups say the agency has not shown a need for an exposure limit much stricter than OSHA’s existing level.

The top executive of the California OSHA (Cal/OSHA) standards board told a June 15 meeting that the agency’s lack of resources is delaying its rules and in turn leading interest groups and state lawmakers to introduce bills that bypass the administrative process and dictate standards directly, such as recent measures on workplace violence, heat and more.

OSHA is seeking to release by the end of this month long-awaited final rules on both electronic recordkeeping mandates and COVID-19 infection controls in healthcare facilities, alongside several proposed policies, while delaying other rulemakings from their previous timelines -- some by over a year, according to its latest Unified Agenda of rulemaking actions.

Trade association officials, attorneys and individual business owners are warning EPA of “massive” complications from its proposal to phase out methylene chloride or mandate strict worker protections for its use, saying that many firms or entire sectors see no ready substitute for the solvent, and others have no way to separate uses subject to the rule from exempt ones.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers is questioning the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on implementation of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program, including a long-discussed overhaul of its governing rules, as they weigh reauthorizing CFATS before it expires on July 27.