The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has upheld OSHA’s enforcement citation for a 2016 accident where a crane being prepared for dismantling touched a live power line, rejecting the employer’s argument that safety standards for crane “disassembly” do not apply to preparatory steps leading up to taking the machine apart.
September 17, 2026
Major unions are criticizing EPA for excluding organized labor from stakeholder discussions on its pending TSCA methylene chloride rule, warning that the failure to consult them led to significant omissions in the proposal’s workplace protections compared with OSHA standards -- even as they praise the agency’s strict occupational exposure limits for the solvent.
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OSHA is proposing to formally require that construction employers ensure their personal protective equipment (PPE) fits workers, reviving an Obama-era plan that the agency originally advanced through the Standards Improvement Project (SIP) but dropped from that process when it drew industry opposition.
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EPA has unveiled a proposed TSCA risk management rule for carbon tetrachloride (CTC or CCl4) that would allow uses that it says represent “essentially all” annual production of the solvent to continue indefinitely if facilities meet strict new worker protection mandates -- as well as a bar against increasing air emissions to surrounding communities.
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OSHA has unveiled its final rule re-establishing electronic recordkeeping and reporting mandates for many employers, largely standing behind the 2022 proposal while narrowing several sector-specific exclusions that unions and their allies criticized in public comments.
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OSHA has announced a new, three-year national emphasis program (NEP) aiming to ramp up inspections and enforcement at warehouses, processing facilities, distribution centers and high-risk retail establishments, following what the agency says is a dramatic increase in their injury rates since 2013.
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OSHA has sent a final rule expected to re-establish Obama-era electronic recordkeeping and reporting mandates to the Federal Register for publication, appearing to cut off long-stayed litigation over the Trump administration’s rollback of those requirements while setting the stage for a potential court challenge from employers.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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