No real surprises came with the Trump administration’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget for OSHA, released in detail Friday May 30, 2025. Less money for standards and enforcement. An overall budget cut of about eight percent. Elimination of 223 full-time employees (12.3% of OSHA staff) which is expected to be achieved through attrition, apparently not layoffs, or reduction in force. These moves have been widely expected given Trump’s and the Republican Party’s deeply embedded anti-regulatory fervor.

OSHA’s total budget would be reduced from $632.3 million in FY 2025 to $582.4 million in FY 2026. Standards-setting would be cut by $5 million from $21 million to $16 million (a 24% reduction) and enforcement would be cut by about $23.5 million (a 13% cut) from $243,000 to $219,343.

The Trump budget predicts that OSHA will conduct only 24,929 inspections next year, an almost 30% reduction from the past year. OSHA’s FY 2025 budget estimated that OSHA would conduct 34,914 inspections.  (Final FY 2025 numbers are not in yet.) And in FY 2024, OSHA conducted 34,682 inspections. These figures come from Jordan Barab’s Confined Space newsletter (Barab was a former acting OSHA chief and a top deputy to OSHA boss Dr. David Michaels during the Obama administration).

Except for two COVID years, and the Reinventing Government initiative of the mid ’90s (there were only 24,024 inspections in FY 1995), this proposed inspection total is the lowest number of inspections in OSHA’s history. In the 1980s at the height of the Reagan administration’s anti-regulatory campaign, OSHA averaged more than 60,000 inspections per year, according to the Confined Space newsletter

A 'wish list'

Every administration’s budget proposal is described as a “request,” and it represents a wish list more than political reality. It is never rubber stamped by Congress. Previous OSHA budget increases have been lowered by Congress, while budget cuts have been softened.

The administration wields more control over the inner workings of agencies such as OSHA, MSHA, NIOSH, EPA, and the Chemical Safety Board (proposed to be eliminated) through the leadership of political appointees such as Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the influence of the White House and the Office of Management and Budget.

At the end of the Biden administration, OSHA was actively working on a heat stress prevention standard and standards covering emergency response workers, workplace violence, infectious diseases, tree care and others. It’s a safe prediction none of these will see the light of day in the next four years. No Republican administration since George H.W. Bush has issued a single major OSHA standard (aside from those ordered by the courts), according to Barab.

Sizeable retrenchments in inspections are common in Republican administrations, with White House instructions overseen by incoming OSHA chief David Keeling (a veteran safety and health professional yet to be confirmed by Congress) and policy advisors, a special advisor, a special assistant, a chief of staff and two top deputies -- all political appointees. OSHA directors of enforcement, standards and other departments are agency careerists whose input is weighed at the discretion of the agency’s political top rung.

“If budgets are the monetary expression of an organization’s values, Trump’s message to workers is: Drop Dead,” said Barab in his summary of the administration’s budget proposal.