Bush offered the job of running OSHA to a career-long industrial hygienist from St. Louis who was a virtual stranger to Washington.
John L. Henshaw had worked for two decades at Monsanto Co., a giant manufacturer of agricultural chemicals. Most recently, he had been the director of environment, safety and health at Astaris LLC, another chemical company.
Even though he had come from industry, Henshaw was viewed by the administration's critics as a more palatable choice than they had expected. "He's a competent, well-regarded safety and health professional," Peg Seminario, the longtime occupational safety and health director of the AFL-CIO, the umbrella labor organization, said at the time. "Well qualified for this important responsibility," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), then chairman of the labor panel, said when Henshaw was approved unanimously by the committee on Aug. 3, 2001, and immediately confirmed without debate.
During his first days in Washington, Henshaw made it clear that he would carry out a directive from Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao instructing the entire department to comb through the regulatory work Clinton's aides had left unfinished and find items to eliminate. Chao explained the order in a letter in 2001 to John J. Sweeney, the AFL-CIO president. The list of incomplete work left over from the Clinton days, she wrote, "had swollen to unmanageable size, containing many items that had been moribund for years, making it an inaccurate and effectively useless document."
Chao's order was in keeping with the new White House philosophy.
The day Bush was sworn in, his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., issued a memo that, in an unprecedented move, put a two-month freeze on final rules across the government that had not yet gone into effect. The new administration wanted time to decide whether to change or reverse them.
A few months later, Graham, the White House's top regulatory official, was alerting agencies that they would face closer scrutiny from the OMB when they proposed new rules. The day after he was confirmed by the Senate, he sent the first of 14 letters to agencies saying they had failed to prove the need for regulations they had proposed. That was more than had been sent during Clinton's eight years.
The most dramatic symbol of the new regulatory climate arose from a joint action by Bush and Congress.
Two months after he took office, a Republican Congress, making first use of a recent power to review regulations, repealed the biggest worker-safety standard of the Clinton years. The standard was a set of rules that created broad safeguards against ergonomic injuries. Without Bush's signature, the repeal could not have taken effect.
The death of the ergonomics standard, Democrats and Republicans now agree, exposed a weakness of Clinton's regulatory strategy at OSHA in his last few years -- putting so much emphasis on that standard that others were left unfinished.
The agency had concentrated nearly all its energy and political capital on the effort to protect workers against musculo-skeletal injuries, such as repetitive-stress injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome. The rules would have required employers to redesign workplaces if they were hazardous and compensate people who became disabled. The Clinton administration believed the standard, covering more than 6 million work sites at an estimated cost of $4.5 billion for employers, was the biggest step the government could take to protect the greatest number of employees.
As a result, OSHA left other major proposals, including the tuberculosis rules, unfinished -- and thus easier to cancel. Those dangling rules, combined with the sudden end of the ergonomics standard, emboldened Bush's corporate allies to fight new rules from OSHA -- and the expense they could entail.
"In the past, the business community worked to develop regulations that were acceptable," said Patrick R. Tyson, an Atlanta lawyer representing corporations in occupational safety matters who held senior positions at OSHA in the 1970s and '80s. "But now the game has changed, and the business community feels like they can kill any regulation they want."
Building Alliances Minus Unions
The new administration began by trying to cut staff and money at OSHA. In his first year in office, Bush wanted to eliminate nearly 100 of the agency's 2,400 jobs. His budget also would have reduced funding for the standards-setting part of the agency by $1.2 million, or 8 percent. Lawmakers restored the money and the positions.
The next year, the administration succeeded in eliminating 10 jobs out of 95 in the standards area, when Henshaw merged divisions dealing with health and safety. The merger, Henshaw said, eliminated duplicative jobs in middle management. But it angered some current and former OSHA employees, who said it cost the agency some of its expertise.
"I finally couldn't take it anymore," said Peter Infante, who retired after 24 years at OSHA as the senior epidemiologist who helped to develop health standards. He had planned to stay long enough to finish years of work on rules to protect workers from beryllium, a metal that can cause cancer if inhaled in minute amounts. Instead, he left in May 2002, saying that the only U.S. company that mines and processes beryllium ore had gained too much influence inside the agency.
Henshaw said in an interview that the bottom line for OSHA is not how many rules it produces but how many people get hurt, sick or killed at work under its watch. He said trends are improving. Henshaw said he is proud that the agency has increased federal inspections of workplaces.
The overall number of inspections has increased under Bush, but the typical inspection takes less time, and fewer are in response to accidents or complaints. OSHA officials say they are more trusting now of industries with good safety records, while putting greater emphasis on those -- such as construction -- where workers are most prone to injury. Union leaders said that inflates an appearance of vigilance, because OSHA counts each subcontractor at a construction site as a separate inspection.
