The midterm elections are ten weeks away. I am not going to tell you who is going to win, and I am not going to tell you who should. What I will tell you, after more than 20 years of watching enforcement cycles from inside large manufacturing, is that the regulatory environment you are operating in right now is the low point of the cycle, that low points do not last, and that most mid-size operations are making decisions today that assume it will.
Here is where things stand. Federal OSHA ended fiscal 2025 with 629 compliance officers, down from 812 a year earlier and from 892 at the end of fiscal 2022, according to the Labor Department’s own inspector general. Federal inspections fell roughly 20 percent in 2025. The agency has an active deregulatory rulemaking agenda, the federal heat standard has been under review since the hearing closed in July 2025 with no final rule, and the revised heat enforcement program that took effect in April 2026 dropped the old inspection goal. On the environmental side, EPA announced in March 2025 that it was targeting more than 30 regulations, and in early 2026 it finalized the rescission of the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding, the legal foundation for a large share of federal climate rules. By any measure, this is a light-touch federal enforcement environment.
The question is what you do with that information. The wrong answer is to treat it as a permanent state and let the program slide. The right answer requires understanding how the cycle actually works.
Enforcement is cyclical. Exposure is not.
The number of OSHA inspectors goes up and down with administrations and appropriations. The number of hazards on your floor does not. Your press brake does not know who won the House. Your combustible dust accumulation does not read the Federal Register. Your workers’ compensation carrier does not care whether the heat standard was finalized; it cares whether you had a heat illness claim in July.
This is the distinction that gets lost in every deregulatory period. Regulation is one of several forces that act on your risk, and it is honestly not the strongest one. Injuries cost money whether or not anyone cites you. Your experience modification rate is set by your losses, not by OSHA’s staffing. Your customers’ contractor prequalification requirements, which for most manufacturers and trades are the real compliance driver, are set by corporate risk departments and the insurance market, and those have not gotten softer. If anything, the ISN and Avetta bar has gone up as the large owners have taken on the enforcement role the agencies stepped back from.
So when a plant manager tells me they are deferring the machine safety program because “OSHA is not coming,” my answer is that OSHA was never the reason to do the machine safety program. It was the amputation.
What an election actually changes
Let me be specific about the mechanics, because they matter more than the headlines.
A change in control of either chamber of Congress does not, by itself, change OSHA or EPA rules. What it changes is oversight, appropriations, and the confirmation of appointees. The law firms that advise on congressional investigations are already telling their clients to prepare for a more aggressive oversight environment in the next Congress regardless of outcome, because both parties have learned to use it. Hearings on workplace fatalities, on enforcement declines, on specific industries, on chemical releases, are the first thing a new majority reaches for. They do not require a rule. They require a subpoena and a bad news story, and they generate agency activity in response.
Appropriations are the second lever. The inspector count fell because of hiring freezes and attrition, not because Congress cut the enforcement line. OSHA itself projected an increase in inspectors for 2026 across federal and state plans. A Congress that wants more enforcement funds it, and the effect shows up in inspection counts within 18 months. This is precisely what happened after 2008 and again after 2020.
The third lever, and the one that actually reaches your plant, is the state. Twenty-two states run their own OSHA programs, and many of them, including Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, California, and Oregon, have continued to enforce heat, ergonomics, and other standards that federal OSHA has not finalized. On the environmental side, the EPA rollback has produced a patchwork: state agencies in some regions are filling the gap with their own rules, and the litigation against the endangerment finding rescission is under way. A multi-state operation is not living in one regulatory environment. It is living in several, and the trend in the stricter ones is not toward relaxation.
The fourth lever is the one nobody plans for: the pendulum. Every deregulatory period in my career has been followed by a catch-up period, and the catch-up periods are harder than a steady state would have been. Rules that were paused come back with shorter compliance windows. Enforcement that was deferred comes back with emphasis programs aimed at the industries that visibly slid. The agencies staff up and the new inspectors are eager. If you have let your program decay for three years, the first year of the next cycle is when you find out.
What is still in force right now
While everyone is watching the headlines, the calendar has not stopped.
The Hazard Communication update has a compliance deadline of November 20, 2026 for the next phase, after the May deadline was extended. If your safety data sheets and labels have not been reviewed against the updated standard, that is a live obligation this year. OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application enforcement program for non-filers launched in March 2026, matching open inspections against establishments that did not submit their 300A data, with the citation window running through early September. That is the single easiest citation to receive and the single easiest to avoid. The revised heat national emphasis program covers 55 high-risk industries and allows random inspections during heat advisories, standard or no standard. Lockout/tagout, machine guarding, respiratory protection, fall protection, and powered industrial trucks are on the top-ten list every year, and the inspectors who are still working know exactly where to find them.
On the environmental side, the endangerment finding rescission affects greenhouse gas rules. It does not affect your air permit, your RCRA generator status, your SPCC plan, your stormwater permit, or your Tier II filing. Those obligations are statutory, they are enforced by states as much as by EPA, and state inspectors are still walking sites. The compliance advice from every environmental firm I respect is the same: an obligation is in force until it is formally nullified, and betting a facility on a rule being nullified before you are inspected is not a strategy.
What “prepared” actually means
I run EHS programs for operations that cannot afford a full-time senior person, so I am not going to tell you to build a compliance department. I am going to tell you what a prepared mid-size operation looks like regardless of who wins in November.
It has a current, honest gap assessment. Not a binder audit, but a scored register of where the operation actually stands against the standards that apply to it, prioritized by the severity of the exposure rather than by the likelihood of a citation. That register is what tells you what to fix in a light-enforcement period, when you have the time and the flexibility to do it on your own schedule.
It has a compliance calendar with owners and dates. HazCom in November. 300A posting in February. Tier II in March. Air permit reports on their schedule. Training on its cycle. When the enforcement environment tightens, the operations that get hurt are the ones that let the calendar lapse because nobody was asking.
It treats the customer and the carrier as the regulator. If your prequalification score is holding, your EMR is trending down, and your written programs are real, an OSHA inspection is an inconvenience rather than an event. The reverse is also true.
It has someone senior paying attention. Not to the politics, but to the regulatory calendar, the state-level activity, the emphasis programs, and the specific rules that touch the operation. That person does not need to be on payroll full time. They need to be accountable, credentialed, and reachable, and they need to be the one who signs the program.
The honest bet
You can bet that the light-enforcement environment continues indefinitely. If you are right, you saved some money on a program you did not need. If you are wrong, you enter a catch-up cycle with a decayed program, a higher EMR, a worse prequalification score, and a target on your industry.
Or you can bet that enforcement is cyclical, that state and customer requirements are already tightening, and that the cheapest time to fix a program is when nobody is forcing you to. If you are right, you enter the next cycle ahead of your competitors. If you are wrong, you still have a lower injury rate and a lower cost of risk, which pays for itself regardless.
I know which bet I would make with my own money, and it is the one I make with my clients’ every day. The election will change the pressure. It will not change the hazards. Prepare for the hazards, and the pressure takes care of itself. If you want to know where you actually stand before the cycle turns, that is exactly what a 30-Day Baseline is for.
Key takeaways
- This is the low point of the enforcement cycle — federal OSHA inspectors fell to 629 at the end of fiscal 2025, inspections dropped about 20 percent, and EPA is rolling back more than 30 rules; low points do not last.
- An election changes oversight, appropriations, and the pendulum — hearings and funding drive agency activity within 18 months, and catch-up cycles are harder than steady states.
- States and customers are already the regulator — 22 state-plan states, environmental patchwork rules, and ISN/Avetta prequalification have not softened and are tightening.
- The calendar has not stopped — HazCom’s November 20, 2026 deadline, ITA non-filer enforcement, the revised heat NEP, and every statutory environmental obligation remain in force.
- Fix the program while nobody is forcing you to — a scored gap assessment, a compliance calendar with owners, and senior accountable oversight are cheapest to build in a light-enforcement period.
Related reading: The Data Center Boom Is an EHS Problem Nobody Has Staffed For · Risk Assessment Is an Art Disguised as a Spreadsheet
