Sponsors
The bill reduces federal workplace-safety regulation, cutting compliance costs and administrative burdens for employers while significantly weakening federal protections, enforcement, whistleblower remedies, and national oversight—shifting risks onto workers, families, state systems, and the courts.
Employers—especially small businesses—would face lower OSHA compliance costs and fewer federal inspections, reducing paperwork, administrative burden, and potential fines.
Federal administrative burdens tied to workplace safety regulation would decrease, potentially saving employer and taxpayer time spent on federal rulekeeping and oversight.
States would gain flexibility to set and implement their own workplace-safety approaches (where state plans exist), allowing tailored rules that some state governments view as more appropriate locally.
Workers in high-risk occupations (construction, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation) would lose federal OSHA protections, increasing their risk of workplace injuries, illnesses, and deaths.
Workers would lose federal whistleblower protections and complaint mechanisms, reducing safe avenues to report hazards and increasing vulnerability to retaliation.
In states without strong occupational-safety agencies, enforcement gaps would leave many workers without any effective regulator to investigate hazards or issue citations.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Repeals the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and abolishes OSHA, removing the federal law and agency that set and enforced workplace safety standards.
Repeals the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and abolishes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), eliminating the federal law and the federal agency that sets and enforces workplace health and safety standards. The text provides no funding, transition plan, or specified effective date; enactment would terminate the agency, its functions, and federal enforcement of OSHA-based standards, creating a regulatory gap that shifts responsibility to states, employers, or other laws.
Introduced January 3, 2025 by Andrew S. Biggs · Last progress January 3, 2025