Summary
The House will use the Congressional Review Act to overturn an unlawful power grab by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which would directly contradict law by unilaterally increasing the time OSHA can target employers for record-keeping violations. The law states explicitly that employers can only be targeted for failing to keep proper health and safety records within a six-month time period, but this rule would extend that to a full five years.
The House has always valued worker safety, but this regulation is a completely illegitimate power grab that would do nothing to help workers while doing a lot to undermine the rule of law.
The Effect
This rule is unlawful. Two federal appeals courts have rejected the very policies reflected in the rule. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stated:
“We do not believe Congress expressly established a statute of limitations only to implicitly encourage the Secretary to ignore it.… Nothing in the statute suggests Congress sought to endow this bureaucracy with the power to hold a discrete record-making violation over employers for years, and then cite the employer long after the opportunity to actually improve the workplace has passed.”
Who It Hurts
Flawed and burdensome regulations—particularly by OSHA—are destroying businesses and jobs As Lisa Sprick, owner of a small roofing company in Oregon testified in 2016, “OSHA seems stuck in a ‘Washington, D.C. knows best’ mode of regulating our industry, and it is not helping to make workplaces safer.”
As the Coalition for Workplace Safety said, this rule “an extreme abuse of authority by a federal agency that will subject millions of American businesses to citations for paperwork violations, while doing nothing to improve worker health and safety.”
Why We’re Doing This
The bureaucracy is a threat to our
· Economy
· Constitution
· and People
The House has already passed legislation to change the structure in Washington so the federal bureaucracy is subject to the people and so we stop getting the same bad results year after year. Now, we’re targeting specific harmful regulations and stripping them off the books.
What We’ve Already Done
The House has already voted to overturn 13 harmful regulations using the Congressional Review Act:
· The SEC Disclosure Rule for Resource Extraction
· The SSA’s Second Amendment Restrictions
· The Federal Contracts Blacklisting Rule
· The BLM Venting and Flaring Rule
· The Teacher Preparation Rule
· The Education Accountability Rule
· The Unemployment Insurance Drug Testing Rule
· The State Retirement Plan Rule
· The Local Retirement Plan Rule