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Eric Conn
Founding Partner and Chair
OSHA Practice Group at Conn Maciel Carey LLP
What Employers Should Expect from OSHA Under a Second Trump Administration
Following another close national election, President Trump returns to the White House for a second term, and resumes control over the vast Executive Branch bureaucracy, including the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
OSHA is coming off the heels of a remarkable period of record-setting enforcement and a flurry of new rulemaking under the Biden/Harris Administration. The pendulum will swing as control at OSHA transitions to the Trump/Vance Administration, but just how much and in how remains to be seen. We have some clues what that will look like based on historical trends and our experience with the Trump/Pence Administration. But President Trump has proven to be unpredictable and during his first term, we never saw a Senate-confirmed Head of OSHA.
This session will review the current enforcement and rulemaking landscape at OSHA during this period of transition, and peek into the crystal ball to predict what OSHA employers can expect over the next several years, including who will be the key decisionmakers at OSHA, what will become of OSHA’s new Worker Walkaround Representative Designation Process Rule and enlarged E-Recordkeeping Rule, the prospects for the ongoing Heat Illness and Emergency Response Rulemakings, and the fate of OSHA’s newest enforcement tools, including the expanded Instance-by-Instance Citation Policy and Severe Violator Enforcement Program.
Eric J. Conn is a founding partner and Chair of the national OSHA • Workplace Safety Group at the law firm Conn Maciel Carey LLP, where he focuses his practice on all aspects of occupational safety and health law. He began his career practicing for more than a decade alongside the former first General Counsel of the OSH Review Commission.
Mr. Conn represents employers in inspections, investigations and enforcement actions involving OSHA, state OSH programs, the Chemical Safety Board, and state and local safety-related agencies. He also handles all aspects of OSHA litigation, from appeals of citations to criminal prosecutions. Mr. Conn also conducts and directs attorney-client privileged workplace safety audits, delivers safety training, and helps employers develop and implement compliant safety and health programs.
Eric writes and speaks extensively on safety and health law issues, including authoring chapters in multiple OSHA law treatises and editing the award-winning OSHA Defense Report Blog. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, CMC’s OSHA Practice was recognized by Chambers USA as 1 of only 3 three “Band 1” rated OSHA firms nationally, and Eric was personally recognized as one of only nine Band 1 rated individual OSHA attorneys. Mr. Conn earned both his bachelor and law degrees from the University of Virginia and served on the Editorial Board of the University of Virginia Law Review.