A former Amazon executive who’s on the president-elect’s shortlist to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has hampered federal efforts to protect workers from extreme heat.
The issue will be top of the agenda for whoever is tasked with leading OSHA in the next administration. The agency proposed first-ever protections this summer, recognizing how climate change has turbocharged temperatures to make heat more deadly.
But the rules haven’t taken effect yet, and the next OSHA chief will decide whether to finalize the standards or abandon them.
It could be up to Heather MacDougall. During the first Trump administration, she chaired a little-known independent agency that reviews OSHA safety citations that have been contested by employers. There, she issued a decision downplaying the dangers of heat that hampered the agency’s ability to punish companies whose workers died of heat exposure.
