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Friday, January 11, 2008

Tug-of-war over Department of Labor Rule Writers

Edwin Foulke, the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), has asked his agency's rule writers to volunteer to temporarily move over to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), according to BNA news service (subscription).

MSHA has been slow to comply with provisions of the MINER Act, a mine safety bill passed in the wake of the Sago and Darby mine disasters of 2006. MSHA has already missed statutory deadlines on regulations that would improve the responsiveness of mine rescue teams and mandate better equipment for rescuers.

But OSHA's regulatory calendar is far from wide open. The Bush administration's OSHA has been downright slothful in promulgating new regulations and, as a result, there are plenty of important rules in the hopper including occupational exposure standards for crystalline silica, beryllium, and diacetyl (the microwave popcorn flavoring chemical).

The agencies are not necessarily to blame for their troubles. A decades-long conservative campaign against government intervention has left most federal agencies underfunded and understaffed. President Bush has been exceptionally effective in continuing this trend, and the new Democratic leadership proved too feckless in the recent budget showdown to reverse it.

Borrowing OSHA staff may not be a positive step for occupational health; but, for the foreseeable future, the mounting workload of these two agencies may be an intractable dilemma.