Lot’s happening (and some things not happening).
Chavez DeRemer Snowed Out
Not happening for now is the confirmation hearing for Lori Chavez DeRemer, Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary, originally scheduled for yesterday. The problem: Snow. Postponed until next Wednesday morning. Stay tuned.
New OSHA Head Nominated
Trump has nominated David Keeling as OSHA’s new Assistant Secretary. Keeling is currently a health and safety consultant. Previously. He was Vice President for Global Health and Safety at Amazon. From Jul 2021 to May 2023, he was Amazon’s Director of Global Road & Transportation Safety.
Keeling held several positions at UPS. He ended his work at UPS as Vice President for Global Safety. He graduated from the University of Louisville and started working for UPS in 1985 as a part-time package handler on the night shift.
In a 2021 article for OH&S Magazine, Keeling said he learned three important things throughout his career:
- Listen to your front-line people: “No one knows the job better than they do.”
- Trust is hard won and easily lost: “Rules must be applied evenly and across all work groups, and management above all must be held to the highest of safety standards.”
- What you incentivize matters: “Genuine, positive reinforcement of good decisions and behaviors is more effective than punishment of bad decisions or behaviors”
In a statement posted on LinkedIn, Keeling said that
I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to President Trump for nominating me to be the next OSHA Administrator at the US Department of Labor. It is an incredible honor, and if confirmed, I am excited about the opportunity to work with Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling to further OSHA’s mission to enhance workplace safety and health.
During his first term, Trump nominated FedEx health and safety director Scott Mugno, but the Senate never confirmed his nomination.
New MSHA Head Nominated
Meanwhile, Trump nominated Wayne Palmer for Assistant Secretary of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Palmer was deputy assistant secretary for MSHA during the first Trump administration. Before that, he was chief of staff to Trump’s first Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta. From July 2021 to January 2025, he was executive vice president at the Essential Minerals Association, which “represents the interests of companies that mine or process minerals that are critical to manufacturing, energy, agriculture, infrastructure, transportation, and technology industries. ”
Prior to the first Trump administration, Palmer spent 13 years in Congress, as legislative director for Ohio Senator George Voinovich and chief of staff to Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.
Bottom Line
I don’t know either of these guys, but I am somewhat encouraged by their nominations — not because I think they’ll represent the interests of working people as strenuously as we’ve been accustomed to in recent Democratic administrations, but because they’re both pretty much what you’d expect from a “normal” Republican administration. (Remember normal Republicans?) And their nominations probably indicate that Trump and Musk are not planning to kill OSHA.
Both will have to go through Senate hearings, so we will learn more about them in the coming months
Keeling has spend his entire career working in the field of workplace safety and health and seems to hold fairly mainstream positions, part of which was for Amazon, with its rather dubious health and safety record. The question for him — as for Labor Secretary nominee Chavez DeRemer — will be how effectively he’ll be able to stand up to the anti-regulatory hostility of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, OMB Director (and Project 2025 author) Russel Vought and the MAGA minions who hold sway in the White House.
Palmer is not a health and safety person, but at least he did not destroy MSHA his first time around.
Is Keeling’s nomination the result of support from Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, Trump’s favorite union President, who also pushed Chavez DeRemer? The Teamsters represent UPS and have undoubtedly had a lot of experience with Keeling.
The thing we need to remember is that workers are not going to be presented with great choices in this administration. We’re not going to get a David Michaels or Doug Parker as OSHA Assistant Secretary. The fact that we’re getting a standard Republican health and safety professional, rather than an ideological, fire-breathing, anti-worker MAGA minion is about all we can hope for these days.
And it’s better than what’s happening at a lot of agencies.
So far.