Closing OSHA Offices will Not Save Money; It will Increase Worker Injuries, Illnesses and Deaths

Elon Musk’s DOGE team has announced that eleven OSHA area offices will be closed, presumably to save money on the rent.  Closing OSHA area offices may be penny-wise, but it is well-beyond pound foolish.

To save a relatively small amount of money by ending some leases, Musk’s team will disrupt the functioning of already under-resourced offices, including the ones not being closed. In the name of efficiency, the DOGE team will cause a tremendous amount of inefficiency, reduce the effectiveness of the agency, and cost the taxpayer far more than is saved by cancelling leases. More importantly, OSHA inspections save lives. Closing offices will result in more injuries, illnesses, and deaths. It is that simple.

Neglecting Cancer Ally

Take the closing of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana office, the only area office in Louisiana.  The experienced safety and health professionals at that office will be forced to choose between leaving the agency or relocating their families to another city hundreds of miles away. Working in the area called “cancer alley”, these federal Compliance Safety and Health Officers (CSHOs) have developed valuable expertise in process safety management – the system to ensure hazardous plants don’t explode, catch fire, or release toxic chemicals into the environment.

Instead of relocating, some CSHOs will take private sector jobs and their expertise will be lost to OSHA.  Even if OSHA is funded to replace them with newly hired inspectors (which seems unlikely to happen at this point), getting them trained to the point where the new CSHOs can inspect complex petrochemical plants will take years and many thousands of dollars in training costs.

If the Baton Rouge office is closed, those enormous oil and petrochemical facilities with significant safety and health hazards will be inspected even less frequently than they are now.

If the Baton Rouge office is closed, those enormous oil and petrochemical facilities with significant safety and health hazards (including risk of fire and explosion that endanger communities as well as workers) will be inspected even less frequently than they are now.

The CSHOs working out of the nearest area offices in Mississippi or Texas will now have to drive many more hours to reach the facilities and will need to stay in hotels rather than sleeping in their homes.  These factors drive up the amount of money and time used for each inspection: even with the same number of CSHOs, the agency will make fewer inspections.  Is this efficiency?

Further, since the OSHA area offices nearest to cancer alley are already overburdened, sending inspectors to Louisiana will mean fewer inspections in Mississippi and Texas as well.  This is especially true because Musk’s people have also targeted a Houston TX office and the Mobile AL office for closure, greatly increasing the number of establishments covered by remaining offices in Alabama and the Texas gulf coast. As a result, DOGE’s actions closing the Baton Rouge office will result in more injuries, illnesses and deaths, not only in Louisiana, but also in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas.

It isn’t fair to employers, either. These closings will mean that high-road employers who invest in worker safety will be at a financial disadvantage competing with employers who choose not to comply with even minimal OSHA standards.

Savings? What Savings?

The DOGE team reports that the savings from ending the lease for the Baton Rouge Office will be a very modest $187,451. But in an administration that allegedly values cost-benefit analysis, it is obvious that Musk’s team did not attempt to estimate the costs of closing that office and relocating staff, nor the additional costs of increased travel, to say nothing about the human and financial costs to workers, their families, their employers, and taxpayers of the additional injuries that will occur because fewer inspections are made.  The National Safety Council estimates that each injury that involves a medical consultation costs $40,000 (in 2022 dollars), so it should be obvious to any observer that the costs of closing just this one office will greatly exceed the savings of $187,451.

The National Safety Council estimates that each injury that involves a medical consultation costs $40,000 (in 2022 dollars), so it should be obvious to any observer that the costs of closing just this one office will greatly exceed the savings of $187,451.

I’d be very surprised if Musk’s team spoke with anyone in Louisiana about the work of the Baton Rouge area office.  It is apparent that DOGE operatives with no expertise in government —  or worker safety – targeted OSHA offices for closure without analyzing the needs of the workers or employers in the areas currently covered by these offices. It is also clear they selected these offices without significant consultation with OSHA staff.

I believe that OSHA needs more, not fewer offices, and many more CSHOs. The nation is making little progress in reducing the rate of fatal injuries.   OSHA has one CSHO for every 81,000 workers and it would take the agency 186 years to visit every workplace under its jurisdiction one time.

Who’s Running Things?

President Trump announced that Department officials, not Musk’s team of disrupters, are supposed to be running the agencies.  If OSHA offices are to be closed (and, again, I believe this is penny wise and pound foolish), or the agency is to undergo any significant reorganization (which is being rumored), the decisions must be left to Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer and incoming OSHA Administrator David Keeling, and should be made only after serious study of the impact of the changes on the workers, employers, and OSHA operations.

Government efficiency is important to everyone. But even before DOGE, federal government agencies have always had specialists that investigate whether federal agencies are using taxpayer dollars efficiently. Those are the Inspectors General who oversee the ethics and efficiency of every government agency. If Trump and Musk were sincere about rooting out waste, they would have called on all I.G. to conduct emergency audits. Instead, Trump has fired many of them – including the Department of Labor’s I.G. leaving twenty-somethings with no experience in government make the decisions that are literally life and death for this nation’s workers.

A similar essay is being published by Industrial Safety and Hygiene News (ISHN)