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The Trump administration's upcoming defense of EPA rules implementing the recently revised toxics law will mark one of the first substantive tests for how well new regulations will withstand legal scrutiny after the agency suffered a series of early court losses as they sought to defend other regulatory delays and officials are scrambling to correct perceived flaws in several draft rules.

Despite allowing its advisory committee on whistleblower protections to become defunct, OSHA is planning a series of public meetings to seek public input on protecting whistleblowers, with the first meeting on whistleblower protections in the railroad and trucking sectors scheduled for next month.

The agency has scheduled the first meeting of the series focusing on the railroad and trucking sectors for June 12 at the Labor Department (DOL) in Washington, DC.

Anticipating procedural challenges from EPA, environmentalists are making the case that an appellate court should consider the merits of their litigation challenging the agency's framework for reviewing new chemicals, charging the policy has the effect of a legislative rule, was issued without following proper rulemaking procedure, and should be vacated.

The Teamsters union is suing several pharmacy benefit managers, drug manufacturers and distributors over excess use of opioids, alleging they marketed the drugs for chronic pain treatment to treat workplace and other injuries despite their limited long-term effectiveness and addictive qualities, which resulted in increased costs for the union's benefits programs and further worsened workplace safety.

Reversing an earlier guidance, OSHA is now requiring employers in the 26 states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands that operate under OSHA-approved state plans to submit injury and illness data as required under the 2016 Obama-era recordkeeping update rule by July 1, even if the employer is covered by a state plan that has not yet adopted an equivalent state rule.

A key labor union is offering a tepid response to OSHA's settlement with industry groups that would narrow aspects of the Obama-era beryllium rule's general industry requirements, but is expressing concerns about future deals that may seek a broader rollback of the rule's requirements for maritime and shipyard industries.

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OSHA has agreed with several industry petitioners to clarify language regarding the ancillary provisions of its Obama-era beryllium rule for general industry and further delay the rule's compliance dates, according to a just-filed proposed settlement, but the rulemaking faces a steep deadline to begin amending the regulation before a May 11 compliance deadline.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is warning OSHA nominee Scott Mugno that the labor movement will be “monitoring his every step,” and that they will organize if he attempts to “move backwards” on worker protections, increasing pressure on the nominee to break from the Trump administration's deregulatory agenda.

During an unveiling of the AFL-CIO's annual “Death on the Job” report, Trumka said that the rise in workplace deaths is a “national crisis” and that President Donald Trump's administration “is making it worse.”

A coalition of local safety and health groups say that an uptick in worker deaths in 2016 should prompt the Trump administration to boost OSHA funding for inspections, arguing that increased resources for workplace safety and health programs and more robust agency follow-up enforcement would help prevent worker deaths.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) says that a process safety management (PSM) system like the one required under OSHA's PSM rule could have prevented a fatal February 2017 explosion at a Louisiana paper mill, putting new pressure on the Trump administration to revive an Obama-era effort to strengthen OSHA's regulation.

Breaking from efforts to reverse various of the previous administration's initiatives, the Trump OSHA appears to be retaining on its website an annotated occupational chemical exposure limit table and stringent guidance language that was a product of an Obama-era effort to bolster the agency's chemical oversight.

Faced with labor shortages that are preventing many jobs from being filled, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta signaled a “step back” in the Trump administration's strict zero tolerance approach on drug use in the workplace, opening the door to a possible softening in OSHA's plans to roll back an Obama-era rule that precludes company policies, such as drug testing, if they deter injury reporting.

Two leading senators plan to renew efforts to pass a bill that aims to lock into state law Obama-era federal environmental and worker safety standards, sources say, after the measure stalled last year in the Assembly amid charges by industry groups that it is illegal and would trigger a wave of new litigation against the state.

“We’ll be pushing for a vote later this year,” a source close to the issue says of the bill, SB 49 by Sens. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) and Henry Stern (D-Agoura Hills).

Environmentalists have filed their opening brief in their suit challenging EPA's “framework” rules for prioritizing and assessing existing chemicals for possible regulation under the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), arguing the rules violate a requirement to conduct a holistic review that considers all of a chemical's uses.

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board's (CSB) is asking a federal appellate court to grant it broad power to subpoena documents related to “potential” releases at facilities where it is investigating industrial incidents, a move that a major refiner is resisting, charging it amounts to an unlawful expansion of the board's powers.

Critics of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's two-year delay of Obama-era updates to the agency's risk management plan (RMP) facility safety program are criticizing a list of prior rule delays that EPA says justify postponing the RMP rule, with opponents of the delay saying the other rules had legal justifications and were not tested in court.

In contrast to the merits of the past regulatory delays, environmentalists and Democratic states opposed to the RMP delay argue in a new court filing that the Trump administration failed to justify the postponement.

OSHA's review commission is seeking unusual public input on whether and how regulators can address workplace heat stress cases under the agency's general duty clause, as a company is challenging a citation arguing that the Secretary failed to establish that the hazard existed or that the employer could have reasonably recognized such a hazard.

Health groups and the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) are at odds over how a federal court should proceed in the plaintiffs' lawsuit alleging the board has unlawfully failed to promulgate rules requiring industrial facilities to report their chemical releases following an incident and are asking the court to resolve the issue.

Environmental, labor and public interest groups are urging White House officials to preserve and quickly implement the Obama-era rule bolstering EPA's facility accident prevention program, even as the Trump administration prepares to issue a plan that is widely expected to scale back the regulation.

House Speaker Paul Ryan's (R-WI) announcement that he would not be seeking reelection in the upcoming midterms appears to have boosted prospects for Democrat Randy Bryce, a union iron worker who is running on a platform that pledges to “fully fund” OSHA in the face of the Trump administration's budget cuts.