Let 'Em Drop Dead From Heat Exposure
The Trump administration won't say that, of course, but that's what it believes.
New York City, 2009. Photo by Jim Henderson.
It’s 73 degrees Fahrenheit and drizzly here in Washington, D.C., so maybe this isn’t the best time to bring this up. But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is holding hearings on a regulation that the Biden administration proposed last year requiring employers to take simple and sensible steps to protect workers as the temperature rises above 80 or 90 degrees, as now occurs more frequently thanks to climate change.
President Donald Trump, who on taking office scrubbed references to climate change from government websites, lacks the nerve to kill the proposed heat-exposure rule outright, which is what I predicted he would do. Instead, Trump’s likely strategy will be to follow the Chamber of Commerce’s lead and water the rule down substantially. That will have the added advantage, former OSHA chief David Michaels pointed out to the New York Times, of pre-empting tougher heat protections in Colorado, which actually gives a shit about outdoor workers. (California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Minnesota, and Virginia, which also have strong heat protections, will be unaffected because their OSHA programs are structured in such a way that the feds are barred by statute from watering down their standards.)* In the red-state South, where it gets both hot and humid, there are no such protections, and indeed Texas and Florida have passed laws preventing local governments from enacting any. Remind me again why the working class voted for this asshole?
Forgive my sour tone but I’m having a Terry Moran sort of day. The immediate source of my foul mood is a New York Times story about Elon Musk’s takeover of the Social Security Administration, which reports (among other horrors) that as Social Security staffers set about correcting Musk’s wildly erroneous claim that 40 percent of callers into the agency’s customer service line were scammers, the agency’s chief received a White House phone call ordering that they cease and desist from doing so. The caller was Katie (Mrs. Stephen) Miller, who was then flakking for DOGE. Mrs. Miller said: “The number is 40 percent.” She explained that Trump believed it to be 40 percent, and that therefore no one was to dispute that figure. “Do not contradict the president,” she said.
This isn’t just authoritarianism; it’s authoritarianism that privileges obedience over the truth and mediocrity over excellence to a degree that makes the whole country feel third-rate. Maybe authoritarianism always does that. Anyway, that Times story made me feel bad not only about my country but about myself for living in such a place. My latest New Republic piece will reinforce your general sense that America is turning stupid and mean. You can read it here.
A final comment. A college friend of mine emailed me the other day apologizing that she just couldn’t give up her digital subscription to theWashington Post, even though she knew it was wrong and suspected that I, being a liberal, would judge her harshly for it. I wrote back that she should never apologize for subscribing to a newspaper, and that she most especially shouldn’t apologize for subscribing to one of the four or five newspapers left in America capable of reporting in depth on national and international affairs. Are the Post and the Times and the Wall Street Journal perfect? Of course not. But they’re the best we’ve got, and if you cancel your subscription you may as well have voted for Trump, because that’s exactly what he wants you to do. The same goes for your local newspaper, and of course I’d be very pleased if you subscribe to The New Republic. Nobody, left or right, should feel superior for not keeping up in these terrible times, and reading websites that only tell you what you want to hear doesn’t count.
*I got this wrong initially. Now it’s fixed.