President Trump was sworn in for a second term the morning of January 20, and he spent the rest of that day setting a record for the most ever Day 1 executive actions.
Among those Day 1 executive actions (and a couple others that followed later in his first week back in the White House), was a series of Executive Orders and directives targeting staffing, budgeting, and rulemaking, which are designed to drastically shrink regulatory and enforcement agencies, like OSHA.
These executive actions – including a hiring freeze, budget cuts, return-to-office mandates, buyouts, and reclassification of career positions into political appointments – are put of a systematic strategy to diminish regulatory agencies.
This effort to shrink OSHA and other executive agencies should come as no surprise to anyone. Dismantling the administrative state was a stated goal of the first Trump Administration and again from the campaign trail this time, and that was one campaign promise President Trump delivered on the last go around. By the end of the first Trump Administration, federal OSHA had shrunk to the fewest number of compliance officers in the agency’s history (dropping from 952 compliance officers at the start of the Trump Administration in 2016 to 761 by January 2020), and the agency had a record number of vacancies in “middle management” positions throughout the Area and Regional field offices.
The Biden Administration focused on rebuilding the ranks at OSHA. Biden had a Deputy Assistant Secretary for OSHA sworn in just a couple of hours after himself on Day 1, and then dedicated the next four years to hiring more than a hundred new compliance officers and filling vacancies through the agency. By the end of 2023, the Biden Administration had built the number of OSHA inspectors back up to 878.
Starting on Day 1 of the second Trump Administration, the writing has been on the wall for OSHA that it is about to experience another major contraction. A smaller OSHA means less resources to conduct inspections (OSHA conducted thousands of fewer inspections during the first Trump Administration than during the Obama or Biden Administrations), engage in robust enforcement (the total number of citations and significant enforcement actions decreased during the first Trump Administration), and to work on or promulgate new standards (there was essentially no new rulemaking, other than deregulatory rulemaking, during the first Trump Administration). We predict similar effects on the work of OSHA during this term.
Here is a breakdown of the key Day 1 and Week 1 executive actions that are designed to weaken federal agencies like OSHA:
Return to In-Person Work” Executive Order
What It Does – One of President Trump’s Day 1 Executive Orders mandated that all federal agencies make immediate arrangements to end virtually all remote-work policies, and require federal employees to return to full time in-person work schedules.
Impact on OSHA – For many federal employees, a return to an assigned in-person work station is infeasible. After remote work became prevalent during the pandemic, many people adjusted their lives, including relocating to different cities, so that a return to in-person work in a particular federal workplace is not possible. The net effect, and the intended effect, will be many federal employees will quit their jobs and leave federal employment – a purge of the federal workforce.
“Fork in the Road”: White House Offering Buyouts to All Federal Workers
What It Does – Spearheaded by Elon Musk, all federal agencies have issued a memorandum offering federal employees the choice to give a resignation notice by February 6th, which would essentially result in eight months of severance; i.e., no expectation of work or return-to-office requirements. By declining the quasi-buy out, federal employees remain under stricter expectations (e.g., return to in-person work) with no guarantee of job security.
Impact on OSHA – With even less veiled intentions than the return to in-person work mandate, this initiative will hasten the purge of the federal workforce. Along with the prospect of a return to full time work, and other expected changes to make federal employment less desirable, the prospect of an eight-month paid vacation is likely to result in a fairly significant exodus from federal agencies, including OSHA.
Reclassify Thousands of Federal Employees from Career to Political Roles (“Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce” Executive Order):
What It Does: The vast majority of federal employees are career civil servants who enjoy job security under a series of civil service laws. That means they are not at-will employees and cannot easily be terminated by a President. The balance of the federal workforce are “political” jobs, appointed by the President, who serve at the pleasure of the President; i.e., they can be removed by the President for any reason or no reason. During his first term, President Trump signed an Executive Order to attempt to reclassify tens of thousands of those career civil servant jobs as political positions, so as to more easily terminate individuals whom President Trump does not believe align with his political agenda. The effort stalled in the face of legal challenges during his first term, and he is trying it again now. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents thousands of federal works, said in a statement: “President Trump’s order is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons. It will remove hundreds of thousands of federal jobs from the nonpartisan, professional civil service and make them answerable to the will of one man.”
Impact on OSHA: Whereas the other executive actions President Trump issued endeavored to incentivize federal employees to quit their jobs, this action is intended to make it easier for President Trump to hand select agency employees to remove, and perhaps to replace some of them with political allies. This will serve to both shrink the agency and to Increase political influence over OSHA operations and enforcement decisions.
Executive Order: “Establishing and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)
What It Does: Stands up the Department of Government Efficiency with authority to propose significant reductions to government programs. DOGE is not technically a government department or agency. It is more of an advisory board, led by Elon Musk, with the goal of massive cuts to federal spending ($500B – $2T is the stated goal) and “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” President Trump said “DOGE will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful spending, and restructure federal agencies.”
Impact on OSHA: The recommendations coming out of DOGE will undoubtedly include budget cuts at OSHA, likely to scale back grant programs, such as the Susan Harwood grants supporting training initiatives, and also to hamstring OSHA’s enforcement and rulemaking capabilities. As with all of the executive actions discussed above, budget cuts prompted by DOGE will also have the effect of shrinking the workforce at OSHA.
Federal “Hiring Freeze” Executive Order
What It Does: Another of President Trump’s Day 1 Executive Orders that suspends hiring for essentially all federal agencies, except for the military.
Impact on OSHA: With a significant decline in federal employment expected due to the so-called “buy out,” the return to in-person work mandate, expected terminations and budget cuts, there will be significant vacancies and staff shortages across OSHA’s ranks, and with a federal hiring freeze layered on top, we can expect those vacancies to remain vacant; i.e., the agency will shrink and will remain smaller than its operations demand. That will necessarily mean fewer inspections, fewer citations, reduced or slower rulemaking activities, and in general, greater difficulty carrying out the agency’s workplace safety mission.
Regulatory Freeze Pending Review” Executive Order
What It Does: This Executive Order suspends implementation of new federal regulations until Trump Administration appointees are put in place to review and approve them (or pull them back). The EO also orders agencies to withdraw rules that have been sent to but not yet published in the Federal Register, and postpones the effective date of published rules that have not yet taken effect.
Impact on OSHA: This EO Immediate halts OSHA’s ongoing rulemaking efforts, including updates to standards and new protections. This includes the Heat Illness Prevention Standard that moved all the way through the notice-and-comment period, and the Emergency Response Rule.
Right out of the gate, the Trump Administration’s is taking bold executive action to systematically dismantle federal agencies, and OSHA is right in the middle of that. While OSHA strained to rebuild its ranks from the first Trump Administration’s cuts, through a multi-pronged strategy of workforce reductions, regulatory rollbacks, and budgetary constraints, the administration is setting the stage to trigger a significant contraction of OSHA’s enforcement and rulemaking capacity over the coming months.
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