New data about the federal agency responsible for workplace safety suggests a substantial drop in inspections in the months after President Trump returned to office last year. The internal data from the Labor Department raises concerns about the government’s ability to police workplaces and protect U.S. workers.
The data, which was released by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, shows a 20 percent decrease in work site inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during a six-month period last year compared with the same period in 2024.
The government has not publicly released data for the number of inspections for the entire 2025 fiscal year. But the decrease during that six-month period raises the specter among labor advocates that the Trump administration is relaxing oversight of companies and increasing the potential for serious injuries and deaths.
The drop in inspections comes on top of efforts by the Trump administration to roll back regulations for worker safety and protections, including efforts to close OSHA offices and offices that protect coal miners across the country. The Labor Department has also said it plans to pull back a requirement that employers provide appropriate lighting at construction sites and ease evaluation mandates for protective equipment for workers regularly exposed to dangerous chemicals.
“You are not only rolling back rules that protect workers — OSHA also appears to be taking a lighter hand in enforcing even the rules that still exist,” Ms. Warren, along with five other Senate Democrats, wrote in a letter on Wednesday to Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and David Keeling, the assistant secretary at the department who oversees occupational safety and health. The senators also noted that inspections over that same period yielded 42 percent fewer “willful violations,” a category that carries some of the highest penalties for employers.
Ms. Warren’s office said that the data shows that between April and September 2024 there were 29,229 inspections, compared with 23,531 during the same time frame last year. In its 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration said OSHA would conduct 24,929 inspections during the fiscal year.
The number of work site inspections has fluctuated from year to year, but by a much smaller margin. (There was a 34 percent decrease in inspections between the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years because of the pandemic.)
The Labor Department did not respond to a request for comment.
OSHA’s role has not been universally embraced.
Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, has been advocating legislation to abolish OSHA and reintroduced a measure last year. The proposal has no cosponsors.
But Republicans have more broadly called for refocusing the agency’s priorities.
“In recent years we have seen a regulatory approach that in many cases may have gone beyond OSHA’s statutory authority,” Representative Ryan Mackenzie, Republican of Pennsylvania and the chairman of a subcommittee on work force protections, said during a hearing in May. “OSHA’s mission is too important to be undermined by overreach,” he added.
Worker safety advocates say fewer inspections will lead to more injuries and deaths on the job, and fewer penalties that have a significant effect in motivating companies to follow the rules.
“Without that kind of deterrent, you have employers saying, ‘Why should I bother spending the money to protect my employees?’” said Jordan Barab, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of labor at OSHA from 2009 to 2017.
OSHA has always been understaffed, former officials routinely note. But its power is largely the deterrent effect, a reminder to employers that there is likely to be an inspection and that a violation can be costly — the most serious and deliberate of which can cost more than $165,000 per infraction.
“OSHA already does so few inspections, so to pare that number back means the agency will have an incredibly reduced impact on keeping workers safe on the job,” said Debbie Berkowitz, who leads occupational safety research at the National Employment Law Project, an organization that supports workers’ rights. “And now those employers will be getting a pass.”
As it is now, there are not enough OSHA inspectors to cover the work of inspecting the country’s 11.6 million work sites, the Labor Department’s inspector general found in a report released last month.
According to the report, in June 2025 there were just 736 federal inspectors, down from 846 in February 2024.
“A lack of available inspectors can lead to fewer inspections, diminished enforcement in high-risk industries and, ultimately, greater risk of fatalities, injuries or compromised health for workers,” the report said.
According to government work force data, the agency has lost nearly 300 employees since Mr. Trump returned to office.
“It’s really a much darker picture” than the report suggests, said Rebecca Reindel, the director of occupational safety and health at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “This is obviously a real danger to workers.”
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
The post Workplace Inspections by OSHA Dropped Over a Six-Month Period of 2025 appeared first on New York Times.
