The Pendulum Swings: Early Executive Actions by Trump Portend a Major Contraction at OSHA
President Trump was sworn in for a second term the morning of January 20 th , and he spent the rest of that day setting a record for the most ever Day 1 executive actions (i.e., Executive Orders, Proclamations, pardons, etc.). 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 (EOs) 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...