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.
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.
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.