What is happening?
The Trump administration is taking a reckless approach to deregulation. In his first day in office, Trump ordered a regulatory freeze, barring departments and agencies from issuing any new regulations and pushing back pending regulations until they could be reviewed by a Trump administration appointee. The administration has issued several additional deregulatory orders, including rescission of Biden administration actions that sought to modernize the regulatory process.
These deregulatory executive orders include, among several others:
- EO 14148: Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions
- EO 14192: Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation
- EO 14219: Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Deregulatory Initiative
- EO 14294: Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations
EO 14129’s directive to cut 10 regulations for every new regulation added signals a disdain for regulation as a concept, rather than an appreciation for government efficiency.
Trump is also changing how several institutions responsible for developing and enforcing regulations function, either by reinterpreting their purpose to be deregulatory (as in the cases of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA], Food and Drug Administration [FDA], and Environmental Protection Agency [EPA]), or hobbling the effectiveness of entities like the National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). This uncritical hostility toward regulation removes guidelines and guardrails that keep U.S. workers and their families safe. The economy is more vulnerable to downturns and public health crises without the protections provided by health and safety regulations.
Why is this happening?
The Trump administration has made its economic policy priorities clear: cut taxes for the rich, make it cheaper to do business, and reduce the scope of government and corporate accountability to workers and their families, especially to poor communities and communities of color. Health and safety regulations prevent employers from engaging in cost-cutting behavior at the expense of workers and communities. Reckless deregulation serves the purpose of reducing costs for employers—even when those regulations protect workers and their families—because regulatory compliance can be costly.
Regulation ensures that workers and their families are shielded from the harms stemming from unrestricted market activity. Policymakers regulate in the wake of crises and tragedies to protect future generations and ensure history does not repeat itself. The Trump administration deregulates recklessly because it dismisses history and does not care about the consequences of bad policy for queer communities, communities of color, or the non-rich, so long as the cost of doing business falls. Inadequate regulation creates the conditions for abuse—and when vulnerability and opportunity for abuse meet, we inevitably see harm.
Why does that matter for public health and worker safety?
Responsible regulations impose costs on harmful business practices, without which there would be little incentive for employers to prioritize worker and public safety over profit. The FDA requiring milk to meet quality standards before it can be sold in stores imposes a cost on dairy farmers, who must operate their farms adhering to safety standards that result in a higher quality product. Reducing FDA staff such that milk quality testing is no longer feasible reduces the scope for regulatory compliance and corporate accountability to consumers, and raises the possibility of exposure to pathogens including bird flu.
OSHA and EPA regulations ensure that employers will be held accountable when they expose workers and their communities to harmful substances. These regulations require coal mines to protect workers from exposure to black lung disease by providing protective equipment and ensuring their operations are minimally damaging to the surrounding community’s water sources through wastewater management. Removing these health and safety regulations and dismantling the institutions that enforce them certainly makes it cheaper to operate the coal mine, but only through imposing a larger public health cost on miners and their communities. Reckless deregulation may save corporations money and “cut government spending” but delivers the opposite of efficiency.
Why does that matter for racial health disparities?
Black and brown workers and their communities will face the worst consequences of Trump’s reckless deregulatory crusade. Their historical lack of access to wealth and political power means that, without the protections that health and safety regulations provide, they remain vulnerable to irresponsible business practices and policy. Laws and regulations prohibiting discrimination in health care and allowing lawsuits based on disparate impact are critical in the battle to close racial health gaps; the Trump administration is dismantling this legal framework through executive orders, setting back that effort toward equity.
Occupational segregation means that minoritized workers are also more likely to be employed doing dangerous work with higher fatality rates and for which health and safety regulations can save lives. In 2023, Black and Hispanic workers died on the job at rates of 3.6 and 4.4 per 100,000 workers, respectively—higher than the rate for workers overall (3.5 per 100,000 workers), and considerably higher than the rates for White and Asian workers (3.2 and 1.6 per 100,000 workers).
Black and Hispanic workers are more likely to die due to heat-related illness on the job compared with white workers, for example. The Trump administration’s regulatory freeze puts a pause on OSHA’s proposed rulemaking on “Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings,” meaning that there are still no federal heat standards for workers. This rule would have required OSHA-compliant employers to develop and evaluate plans to protect workers from heat-related injuries and illnesses.
Losing environmental protections means exposing Black and brown communities to pollution, and further removing means to hold corporations accountable for the pollution they cause. Black and brown communities are disproportionately exposed to toxic waste; when given the funds to properly collect data and enforce policy, institutions like EPA provide the necessary regulatory framework for moving toward environmental justice and ultimately addressing the health disparities that arise from environmental racism. In the face of clearly visible racial inequities, the lack of rules and regulations to address those inequities essentially maintains structural racism.
What will it mean economically for workers and their families?
Reckless deregulation benefits employers and the wealthy at the cost of exposing the rest of the economy to greater risk and inefficiency. Short-term profits and cost savings from deregulation have historically set the stage for devastating economic consequences for workers and their families. Profit-seeking deregulation in banking set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis that tanked the world economy. Predatory payday lenders, exorbitant credit card late fees, and discrimination in lending all represent significant costs to U.S. households.
The greater health risks that come with removing health and safety regulations will cost workers and their families economically. While the Trump administration is removing COVID-19 vaccine mandates from schools, new, more contagious strains of the disease are appearing across the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have cost the United States $14 trillion due to reduced economic output and worsened health and premature death. Ironically, one area where the Trump FDA is pursuing more stringent regulation is in vaccine access. Using the regulatory system to pursue ideological crusades is dangerous and inefficient.
What can we do about it?
The Trump administration is engaged in a reckless crusade against health and safety regulations that will worsen our public health, cost us economically, and ultimately make the country more vulnerable to the next economic downturn and public health crisis. This is happening because the administration is more concerned with providing tax breaks for the wealthy and allowing corporations to irresponsibly cut costs than with protecting U.S. workers and their families. The consequences of this deregulatory crusade will fall heaviest on Black, brown, and poor workers and communities, because they are most in need of the protections that health and safety regulations provide. But make no mistake: The entire economy will suffer in the event of a recession or pandemic brought on by our collective exposure to more risk.
We need a responsible approach to regulation that takes seriously the need for guidelines and guardrails around doing business and implementing policy. A responsible regulatory framework would center equity-enhancing regulations and support the institutions charged with enforcing those regulations. The Trump administration is targeting and dismantling those very institutions. Protecting workers and their families means repairing our damaged regulatory system, being protective of existing responsible health and safety regulations, and being proactive about establishing new regulations where necessary to safeguard against future crises. Trump’s irrational hostility towards regulation benefits the few at the cost of putting us all at greater risk.
The subprime mortgage crisis is clear example of this; in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, Black families were targeted with subprime mortgage loans even when they could afford conventional ones because 1) Black families did not have access to mortgages at the same rate as white families and so were eager to own a home when offered a chance (vulnerability), and 2) there were weak regulations on the kinds of mortgages that could be offered to prospective homebuyers and that could be bought and sold in financial markets (conditions for abuse).
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