The Senate has unanimously approved its bipartisan bill reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), clearing the way for a conference negotiation with House representatives over the lower chamber's much narrower bill, which won approval with wide support last June.
September 17, 2026
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is transferring responsibility for prosecuting many workplace safety violations to its environmental division and instructing prosecutors in those cases to enforce environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, noting that labor statutes provide for less stringent penalties than federal air, waste and toxics laws.
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OSHA came out better than some health and safety advocates had expected in a House GOP funding deal unveiled early Wednesday that freezes the agency's funding at its current level and scraps a Republican plan to block issuance of a workplace silica standard.
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OSHA is asking stakeholders whether the agency's draft revised Safety and Health Program Management Guidelines are friendly to small- and medium-sized businesses, an issue the agency raised along with others at a public meeting last week and on which it hopes to gather feedback as comments trickle in through the Feb. 14 deadline.
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OSHA recently reached a corporate-wide settlement with Dollar Tree Stores Inc. that calls for the company to pay $825,000 in penalties from 13 different inspections and institute a comprehensive safety and health program, the latter a condition that agency chief David Micheals signaled last week may increasingly be part of future settlement agreements.
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The director of the Environmental Protection Agency's influential risk analysis program is promising stakeholders once again that they will see certain improvements in the program in the coming year although the agency has yet to make good on pledges to produce more assessments, release a multi-year prioritized schedule of chemicals under assessment, remove outdated pesticide assessments from the program's database and make other changes.
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The Environmental Protection Agency and environmentalists are objecting to petitions before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that would significantly weaken protective exposure levels to radiation by discarding the long-standing model correlating increasing radiation doses with increasing cancer risks and replacing it with one that would deem certain levels of radiation harmless and even helpful.
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State regulators are raising Administrative Procedure Act (APA) concerns about a provision of the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized worker protection standards (WPS), arguing a restriction on pesticide spraying that extends the rule beyond farmers' fields was not proposed for public comment and imposes unreasonable burdens on growers.
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Activist groups are objecting to petitions before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that would significantly weaken protective exposure levels to radiation by discarding a long-standing model correlating increasing radiation doses with increasing cancer risks and replacing it with one that would deem certain levels of radiation harmless and even helpful.
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Environmentalists are calling for the National Toxicology Program (NTP) to proceed with a review of potential human health risks of neonicotinoids after NTP apparently downplayed the possibility of review following industry arguments that an NTP evaluation would duplicate the Environmental Protection Agency's registration review of the controversial class of pesticides advocates say harm bees.
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Leaders of the Environmental Protection Agency's influential Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) assessment program have started preparing colleagues in regional and program offices that use IRIS assessments in their regulatory work for novel risk specific dose calculations that will be included in the pending assessment of arsenic's human health risks.
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Worker safety advocates are lauding the decision of a jury on Thursday (Dec. 3) to convict Don Blankenship, the ex-CEO of Massey Energy, on a federal charge stemming from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in 2010.
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Safety activists are urging White House officials to ensure that the Environmental Protection Agency issues a final industrial facility safety rule that includes a mandate to use inherently safer technologies (IST) and to issue it before President Obama leaves office, after learning from EPA that the agency will likely delay proposing the rule and not mandate IST.
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OSHA has created new resources for hospitals to put stringent measures in place to prevent workplace violence, the latest step in federal efforts as state plans including California's OSHA program continue to either look at enacting regulations or leveraging existing requirements to reduce violent incidents.
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OSHA is holding up a recently completed study from Canada regarding the effectiveness of fines from inspections as bolstering the agency's long-held view that strong enforcement activity has been shown to push down injury and illness rates, coming as the agency gears up to increase its penalty caps.
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Federal chemical safety investigators approve of several actions taken by petrochemical giant BP -- particularly efforts to ensure workers can lodge safety complaints without fear of retaliation -- in the wake of the deadly 2005 explosions at the company's refinery in Texas City, TX.
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OSHA's standards division will not begin preliminary internal work on the rule expected next year to boost the maximums on penalties for safety and health violations until it receives pending guidance from the White House budget office, agency chief David Michaels tells Inside OSHA Online.
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OSHA chief David Michaels, looking ahead to his last year in office, says the agency will continue to employ innovative measures to use its limited resources effectively, pointing to areas such as a new inspection weighting system and non-regulatory guidance materials designed to put issues in front of employers, in addition to targeted enforcement and the pursuit of several key rules before the close of the Obama administration.
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OSHA's newly rolled-out draft update of its longstanding voluntary program management guidelines, first offered to the public in 1989, can help companies coordinate efforts on multi-employer work sites -- increasingly a concern for occupational safety and health as the U.S. economy becomes more fragmented with temporary employment and similar arrangements, OSHA chief David Michaels tells Inside OSHA Online.
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Trichloroethylene (TCE), a solvent OSHA stakeholders have urged federal officials to consider for tighter workplace regulation, is again subject to controversy as the Environmental Protection Agency sets deadlines for proposing bans of certain uses of several existing chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
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