Litigation

Public interest groups are suing EPA over its failure to ban paint-stripping uses of methylene chloride after finding that it does not meet the Toxic Substances Control Act's (TSCA) risk standard, marking one of the first legal tests of the agency's responsibilities to regulate toxic substances under the law since Congress revised it in 2016.

Bolstered by a recent ruling, Public Citizen and other health groups are asking a federal court to find the Trump OSHA violated federal law when it delayed mandates for employers to submit detailed 2017 worker injury and illness reports and order the agency to “require and accept” the data that the Obama administration had required by July 2018.

Public Citizen and other health groups are preparing to file a motion asking a federal judge to quickly order the Trump OSHA to require employers to submit detailed 2017 worker injury and illness reports as required by a now-delayed Obama-era rule after the judge rejected agency efforts to dismiss the case and upheld the groups' standing to sue.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that seeks to overturn the 21-year-old precedent that requires judges to defer to OSHA and other agencies on the meaning of their regulations -- a precedent at the center of many court rulings addressing agency rules but one that many of the court's conservatives have openly criticized for years.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is backing OSHA's policy that allows the agency to cite “controlling employers” for hazards to other employers' workers on a job site, backing, for the first time in this appellate circuit, the use of Chevron deference to uphold OSHA's OSH Act authority to address multi-employer sites.

OSHA continues to bolster its oversight of industrial facilities through inspections under a 2017 National Emphasis Program (NEP) and data-sharing with EPA enforcement officials, despite the agency's decision to shelve a planned strengthening of its process safety management (PSM) rule, according to industry attorneys.

OSHA has sent for White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review a proposed rule seeking to revise an Obama-era rule strengthening the agency's beryllium standards, changes that are part of a settlement with industry groups that calls for clarifying ancillary provisions of the Obama-era rule's general industry standard.

Public Citizen is urging a federal court to preserve its suit challenging the Trump administration's suspension of OSHA's Obama-era injury and illness reporting rule, charging that the agency's motion to dismiss wrongly claims it lacks standing and that the court lacks jurisdiction.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is faulting the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board's (CSB) spending on legal fees in a dispute with the board's former managing director, saying that CSB's continued focus on the on the matter distracts from its mission of investigating facility accidents.

Labor and environmental groups challenging the Trump administration's rules for reviewing existing chemicals' risks to workers and the environment under the revised toxics law are rejecting EPA assertions that the law grants the agency broad discretion to determine the chemical uses it considers for possible regulation, charging that EPA must consider all conditions of use.