Legacy 3

Less than a month to go and although Bush has retreated to the Crawford Ranch, where he said he wanted to spend his days after the Presidency in the country away from Washington, DC and cities in general burnishing his image as a non-effete American, except that he is actually moving to Dallas where he has just purchased a new residence, the litany of disaster continues. Monday’s Washington Post detailed how political appointees in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) continually overrode staff scientists conclusions and changed the focus of the agency from protecting the public to favoring business interests. Following are excerpts from the Post article:

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at OSHA 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. 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.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton's tenure, according to White House lists.

More than two dozen current and former senior career officials further said in interviews that the agency's strategic choices were frequently made without input from its experienced hands. Political appointees "shut us out," a longtime senior career official said.

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.

Former OSHA director Edwin G. Foulke Jr. and other Bush appointees dispute the criticisms and say the agency carefully directed its scarce resources at the most dangerous workplaces, notably levying heavy fines after major workplace disasters. Foulke also expressed pride that a drop in reported workplace injuries that began in 1974 continued unabated under Bush and said that "we've done, I think, a really good job of moving things along" in rulemakings that proved to be more complex and time-consuming than he had anticipated.

Labor advocates, academic scholars and some OSHA officials have said that the decline in reported injuries is partly the result of a 14 percent drop in U.S. production and manufacturing jobs since 2001 and a 2002 change in the government's record-keeping rules.

The agency's first director under Bush, John L. Henshaw, startled career officials by telling them in an early meeting that employers were OSHA's real customers, not the nation's workers. "Everybody was pretty amazed," one of those present recalled. "Our purpose is to ensure employee safety and health. . . . He just looked at things differently."

Within two years, Henshaw, an industrial hygienist who had worked for Monsanto and another chemical firm, withdrew 26 draft regulations on OSHA's public calendar, including rules meant to limit workplace exposure to air contaminants, highly hazardous chemicals, and shipyard and scaffolding hazards.

In many cases, the agency cited "resource constraints" as the reason. But Charles Gordon, a Labor Department lawyer who worked on OSHA regulations in the solicitor's office from 1975 until January, said that "all the work had been done" on many of the rules, including laborious, peer-reviewed risk assessments and economic analyses.

Henshaw, acting in concert with legislation passed by the Republican majority in Congress, quickly withdrew a proposed regulation -- drawn up during the Clinton administration -- meant to curtail ergonomic problems, which OSHA studies have said cause 60 percent of workplace injuries. He promised, instead, to issue nonmandatory guidelines and to cite violations under a general OSHA statute promoting safety.

But Richard Soltan, who retired from OSHA in 2006 after seven years as the Philadelphia regional administrator and 11 years as a deputy administrator, called Henshaw's promise "a sham." "I don't think we prosecuted two cases," Soltan said. "It was window dressing."

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.

In an interview, Foulke denied falling asleep at work, although he said he was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed. His goal, he said, was to create the best agency he could, partly by putting in place "performance metrics" not previously used at OSHA.

Foulke said his senior staff appeared "pretty enthusiastic," but he acknowledged that there were grounds for tension with others. Leadership, he said, is "taking people down a path they don't want to go, until you get them to a place where they realize this is where they need to be."