The Deregulation of EHS 2025: Common Sense or Nonsense?

Regulatory compliance is one of the most popular topics that we cover here at EHS Today, and that’s probably been the case dating back to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the early 1970s. Today, more than a half-century later, EHS professionals are still seeking clarity as to what exactly the various federal and state regulatory agencies expect from them.

One thing we know for sure: Regulatory compliance can be expensive, in some cases even exorbitant. According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the cost of federal regulations to the U.S. economy is over $3 trillion. Going by NAM’s calculations, the average per-employee cost of regulations for a manufacturer is $29,100, and it gets even more expensive for small manufacturers: $50,100 per worker. Keeping the workplace safe and healthy is a good thing, but why does it have to be so expensive?

That’s the question that politicians—and the constituencies that have elected them—have wrestled with for decades. The direction of the regulatory agencies historically has been subject to the whims and political postures of whichever party is in dominance at any given time. At the moment, with the Republicans firmly in control of all three branches of government, there is an obvious movement towards deregulating as many existing rules and sidelining as many proposed rules as possible, throughout all the various agencies. But let’s just focus on EHS-related regulations.

The term “common sense” is one of President Trump’s favorite expressions. For instance, in his second Inaugural Address this past January, he called for a “revolution of common sense” as part of his plan to completely restore the United States. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was created to eliminate wasteful agencies and activities that add costs but little to no benefit to the businesses being regulated.

To take one example, the regulation of “forever chemicals” (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS) has been a political hot potato for quite some time. The EPA under President Biden issued rules regulating the amount of PFAS allowed in drinking water, at a cost to industry of at least $1.5 billion (EPA’s estimate), and as much as twice that amount (industry estimates). One of the first actions taken in the Trump 2.0 Administration was to roll back those Biden-era thresholds on forever chemicals.

Explaining the rollback, EPA Commissioner Lee Zeldin stated, “We are on a path to uphold the agency’s nationwide standards to protect Americans from PFOA and PFOS in their water. At the same time, we will work to provide common-sense flexibility in the form of additional time for compliance.” Zeldin has also affirmed that protecting the environment and growing the economy are not “binary choices. We must and we will choose both.”

Common sense? That’s not how Katherine O’Brien, an attorney with environmental law firm Earthjustice, sees it. According to O’Brien, “The Trump administration’s decision to green light the continued pollution of our drinking water with toxic PFAS while crowing about their commitment to making America healthy is a sick joke.”

There is also a continuing debate on the near-elimination of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), an organization that primarily conducts research into workplace safety (in a non-regulatory fashion). The justification for eliminating NIOSH is that like other bureaucracies, its activities were seen as wasteful and inefficient. But Nicole Greeson, president of the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA), says that NIOSH’s activities more than justify its existence, pointing to a study from the Rand Corporation that found that three NIOSH case studies (with a cost of $5.1 million) resulted in an annual economic value of $338 million to over $1.2 billion. “NIOSH provides a significant return on investment,” she asserts.

When you get right down to it, the deregulation of US businesses, particularly as it impacts on occupational health and safety, can’t conclusively be dismissed as nonsense since there is a very real rationalization for all these efforts, and in fact President Trump was elected both for his pro-business and his government-reduction policies. But neither can it be said that all these moves reflect common sense since making the workplace and the environment less safe and less healthy is hardly in the best interests of the country’s workforce. So while it’s really neither common sense nor nonsense, it’s safe to say that deregulating EHS is a matter of dollars and cents.