Bush's OSHA: 20 days to garbage pick-up

About ten people sent us links to the Washington Post front page news that isn't news to anybody in occupational health. "Under Bush," the headline read, "OSHA Mired in Inaction." You don't say!

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day's exposure at the agency's permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease.

After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country's principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. The epidemiologist, Peter Infante, incorporated what he considered reasonable changes requested by the company and won approval from key directorates, but he bristled when the private firm complained again.

"In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay," Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency's director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from "the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues," to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure. (R. Jeffrey Smith, WaPo)

Knowing Peter Infante (one of the country's best occupational health epidemiologists) I can imagine how infuriated he was. He resigned shortly afterward. I doubt Peter took much solace knowing other health protection agencies were suffering the same fate -- not to mention regulators in the financial sector. No, we won't mention that. Significant OSHA rules or regulations were down 86% over the Clinton era. Believe me, it's not because workplaces were so safe there was nothing to do:

Among the regulations proposed by OSHA's staff but scuttled by political appointees was one meant to protect health workers from tuberculosis. Although OSHA concluded in 1997 that the regulation could avert as many as 32,700 infections and 190 deaths annually and save $115 million, it was blocked by opposition from large hospitals.

In the summer, the agency decided against moving further toward the regulation of crystalline silica, the tiny fibrous material in cement and stone dust that causes lung disease or cancer. OSHA promised a scientific peer review of the health risks by early 2005 and then by early 2007, but it never acted. Regulating silica exposures would have prevented an estimated 41 silicosis deaths and 20 to 40 lung cancers annually, according to OSHA.

In the spring, political appointees quietly scrapped work on another long-pending regulation of hazardous exposure to ionizing radiation in mailrooms, food warehouses, and hospitals and airports. It cited "resource constraints and other priorities" -- the same reason officials gave for withdrawing more than a dozen regulatory proposals in 2001.

The Bush folks have succeeded in one area, however. By ruining the manufacturing economy, injuries have gone down. In the language of epidemiology, if you have less exposure to work, you'll likely have less workplace injury. Thanks, but no thanks, as Governor Palin might say.

Under Bush, OSHA reoriented its mission to serve its "real customers." Workers and their safety? Forget it. According to Bush's first OSHA director John Henshaw (and former Monsanto employee), employers were the "customer." And the first service he performed was to withdraw 26 draft regulations on OSHA's public calendar. Henshaw's worse-than-do-nothing leadership gave way to asleep-at-the-switch leadership. Literally:

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.

Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake. "We'll be sitting there and things will fall out of his hands; people will go on talking like nothing ever happened," said a career official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter.

The WaPo article is full of other juicy details of corruption, incompetence and reckless disregard of worker safety within the Bush administration OSHA. It would be laughable if the real punch line weren't the loss of workers' lives and health.

There are just a few hours more than 20 days left in the Bush administration. Plenty of time for them to kill more workers, endanger more communities and profit from trashing the country, its economy and its welfare. Then it will be good riddance to the worst sort of human garbage.