Our long wait is over. The White House Office of Management and Budget has finally issued its latest Regulatory Agenda.
Don’t feel bad if you missed it. The reg agenda was released late Friday, July 3, right before all of the fun 4th of July sesquicentennial activities. Unlike last year, no press release was issued. (Late Friday nights are always good times for Administrations to issue uncomfortable news. Especially right before holidays.)
The Regulatory Agenda — a list of regulatory actions that agencies are working on and the schedule for the next steps — is normally issued two times a year — in the Spring and in the Fall. While it’s not uncommon for OMB to delay Reg Agenda releases to the Summer and the Winter, for the first time in recorded memory, OMB skipped the Fall 2025 Regulatory Agenda. This one is titled simply “Agency Rule List,” instead of the normal “Agency Rule List Spring (or Fall).”
So, is OMB moving to just one Reg Agenda a year instead of two? Or are they just incompetent? Or both. We’ll see.
Anyway, what’s on OSHA’s and MSHA’s regulatory plate these days?
Here are the lowhighlights.
OSHA Heat Standard
There appears to be some breaking news on heat. Or maybe not.
As we all know, despite record-breaking heatwaves hitting the United States (and the rest of the world), OSHA has still not issued a national heat standard. To bring you up to date, the Biden administration issued a strong proposed standard in 2024 and the Trump administration went ahead with hearings on that proposal in June 2025. OSHA then extended the post-hearing comment period twice, to October 30, 2025.
What’s next?
As we’ve reported before, there are two directions the Trump administration can go: either issue a weak standard or no standard at all. Many in corporate America who would accept a weak performance standard. They fear that if Trump doesn’t issue a weak performance standard (similar to Nevada’s heat standard), the next Democratic administration will issue a strong specification standard, similar to the Biden proposal. They think it’s better to pre-empt a strong (Democrat) standard with a weak (Republican) standard.
And then there are those anti-regulatory ideologues who hate all new standards all the time.
But even a weak “performance” standard would be bad for workers. With a few exceptions (such as OSHA’s Process Safety Management Standard), performance standards are not as effective as specification standards (where OSHA specifies most of the detailed actions that employers must take) and are much more difficult to enforce. Issuance of a supplemental proposal would indicate that the “weak standard” advocates are winning.
The current Regulatory Agenda announces plans for a “supplemental” heat proposal to be issued by next December. This indicates that OSHA may be heading back to the drawing board, probably to issue a very different — and weaker version of the Biden proposal.
Either that, or they can always change their mind later and do nothing.
Anyway, by December, who cares? It will be cold out there.
What’s a Supplemental Proposal?
Good question. I have never heard of a “supplemental proposal.”
A little background: OSHA is allowed to make changes from a proposal to a final standard, as long as the changes are a “logical outgrowth” of the original proposal. In other words, if the original OSHA proposal suggested alternative requirements for discussion, or there was robust discussion about alternative requirements in the public comment and hearings so that the changes in the final standard were “reasonably foreseeable.” Few final standards look exactly the same as the proposal.
But if the changes in the final standard are too significant OSHA can get into legal trouble unless there is additional notice and comment on the changes. That would be done through a supplemental proposal. And, much to my surprise, a “supplemental proposal” is actually a thing under the Administrative Procedure Act, which covers all federal rulemaking:
A supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking is a notice and request for comment published in the Federal Register when an agency has made significant substantive changes to a rule between the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [NPRM] and the final rule. The SNPRM [Supplemental Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] allows the public to comment on the changes. A “significant substantive change” is any new requirement in the rule that goes beyond the scope of the requirements in the NPRM.
If OSHA goes forward with the Supplemental, they will need to set another public comment period and then consider those comments before issuing a final standard. It is also possible, but not necessarily required, that OSHA would hold another public hearing before issuing a final standard.
Even without another hearing, these additional steps will would be quite time consuming — likely taking many months or years to complete. The curious thing is that OSHA is predicting that a final standard will be issued by October 2027 — an impossible deadline even without the draconian staff losses in OSHA’s standards office — unless the agency is plotting some kind of unprecedented (and likely illegal) shortcuts.
Given that no final decision has been made on which direction to go, the time required to write a Supplemental Proposal and get OMB approval, then publish and solicit comments on that proposal, consider the comments, make decisions on the final regulatory text, write the final standard, and then get final OMB approval, it is highly unlikely that we will see any heat standard during the final 2-plus years of this administration.
Other News
Otherwise, there’s not much news. OSHA’s Workplace Violence and Process Safety Management (PSM) modernization continue to molder on the “Long Term” Agenda. That’s where standards go to rot when OSHA has little intention (or resources) to work on, but doesn’t want to drop completely.
Violence and PSM were moved to the Long Term agenda last year, and Communication Tower Safety, Shipyard Fall Protection and an update of OSHA’s Powered Industrial Trucks standard are now joining them there. Most likely all victims of major staff shortages in the OSHA standards office, as well as the lack of regulatory staff in OSHA’s construction directorate which is tasked to write the Communication Tower standard.
The agency still seems to be on track to issue proposals for its Tree Care standard in October and a final Emergency Response standard next April. The tree care industry has lobbied heavily for a standard (mainly to stop landscapers and other amateurs from doing tree care). The Emergency Response standard had come under fierce attack for including volunteer fire departments, so it’s likely volunteers will be dropped from the final standard.
A proposal to update to OSHA’s Lockout Tagout standard is also predicted to be issued in November. That update would allow computerized lockout for modern equipment instead of physical padlocks.
Deregulatory Actions
To make up for the lack of progress on heat and other hazards, OSHA is moving forward on deregulatory actions. On August 19, OSHA will open hearings to consider changes in a number of chemical standards, weakening medical evaluation requirements for filtering facepiece and loose-fitting powered air-purifying respirators, changing color codes to warn of hazards in textile mills, sawmills and shipyards and modifying the Walking-Working Surfaces standard.
Aside from the proposal to drop medical monitoring requirements from certain types of respirators, most of these proposals will have only a minor impact. But they do take up a lot of time and resources that OSHA could be using to issue standards that actually protect workers.
Silica in Mines
Meanwhile, over at MSHA, the Reg Agenda announced that MSHA would issue a proposal this month “to amend the Agency’s existing respirable crystalline silica standards and respiratory protection provisions.” According to the Reg Agenda, the proposed rule will “clarify” and “update” “requirements for exposure monitoring, methods of compliance, respiratory protection, and medical surveillance without reducing protections afforded to miners.”
A little background. In an effort to slow the skyrocketing rise of silica-related severe black lung cases plaguing this country’s miners, the Biden administration issued a long awaited silica standard to protect miners in April 2024. The protections included in the standard were projected to prevent 1,000 annual deaths and nearly 4,000 cases of black lung disease. Before the new rule could come into effect in April 2025, the Trump administration postponed enforcement for four months, then for another two months. The standard is still not being enforced, over a year later, allegedly because it is being challenged in court.
Then, last December, as part of its deregulatory agenda, the administration announced that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) would “reconsider” the MSHA silica standard with the intention of making changes — likely those requested by mine operators and Congressional Republicans.
How MSHA will be able to legally weaken the silica standard is a mystery. Section 101(a)(9) of the Mine Safety and Health Act states that “No mandatory health or safety standard promulgated under this title shall reduce the protection afforded miners by an existing mandatory health or safety standard.
But fear not. MSHA assures us that the proposal will “support the Administration’s goal of reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens without compromising miner health and safety.”
Color me skeptical.