It was emblematic when David Keeling was finally confirmed as the next head of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) because his confirmation occurred while more than 70% of the federal agency’s employees were on furlough due to the government shutdown. Keeling, whose official title is Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, surely had to sense the irony in his appointment taking place during a work stoppage. Even for somebody like Keeling, whose safety career has been largely spent in logistics (at UPS and Amazon), the wheels of the federal government spin very slowly, when they spin at all.
At this writing, the shutdown is still very much unresolved, but in a larger sense, OSHA has been in something of a holding pattern almost the entire year, along with other federal agencies involved with workplace safety, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Funding for these agencies under the Trump 2.0 administration has been dramatically curtailed (repeating a pattern of cutbacks seen during the first Trump presidency), with the number of employees responsible for the health and safety of the country’s workers decreasing significantly.
But in fact, OSHA has been shrinking for years, and actually, for decades. Founded in 1971, by 1980 the federal agency was employing just shy of 3,000 staff (2,951); today that number has dropped to 1,664, a decline of 44% from its peak. Of course, reducing the size of government bureaucracies is often seen by voters as a good thing, which helps explain why politicians frequently target federal agencies as a way to control spending (or more accurately, shift that spending to other government programs).
However, it’s telling that as OSHA itself—and particularly, the number of inspectors it employs—has shrunk over the years, the number of workplaces (and workers) it is responsible for has steadily grown. According to an analysis of OSHA employment data conducted by the AFL-CIO, in 1980 there were nearly 15 OSHA inspectors per million workers; today that number is closer to 6 per million workers, and that ratio is likely to get even smaller if current trends continue.
In the EHS Today 2025 National Safety and Salary Survey, respondents had the chance to weigh in with their thoughts regarding federal (or state, if applicable) OSHA. Following is a sample of their comments:
What’s one thing you’d most like to see OSHA do more of?
· Focus more on updating outdated standards to reflect modern work environments, technologies and risks.
· Develop programs for colleges and universities that could help train for safety careers.
· Enact the heat stress and ergonomics standards.
· Focus on the bad actors and leave those of us who take safety seriously and have great safety programs alone.
· Practical, on-site enforcement and education.
· Help small businesses grow their safety programs and not be the safety cops.
· More resources/templates for compliance documents and training.
· Apply regulations to owners and general contractors rather than just employer/employee relationships.
· Audit more and increase fines for blatant unsafe conditions.
· Stop weakening safety regulations.
What’s one thing you’d most like to see OSHA do less of?
· Public shaming. It doesn’t move the needle on workplace safety and often becomes more of a distraction than a deterrent.
· Create burdensome regulations that are convoluted, hard to comply with, time-consuming and expensive, and conflict with other regulations.
· Laying off OSHA employees.
· Relying heavily on reactive investigations instead of proactive oversight.
· Stop downsizing OSHA staff and handing off compliance regulation to companies to do themselves.
· Focus less on DEI.
· Pitting employees against the employers.
· Implementing and enforcing policies that don’t inherently make workers safe.
· Stop thinking that the more inspections that are conducted, the safer the companies will be.
· Dropping safety requirements and weakening safety regulations.
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate, David Keeling stated that his three main goals at OSHA are to: 1) accelerate the adoption and use of technology and predictive analytics for regulatory oversight and rulemaking; 2) expand cooperation and collaboration between professional groups, companies and unions, while modernizing Voluntary Protection Programs; and 3) transform enforcement through the use of predictive analytics to prevent incidents before they occur. We wish him well, and we hope that the promise of a more tech-savvy (though smaller) OSHA results in safer workplaces and healthier employees.
