CRF Comment Submission: Regulatory course corrections continue

Last week was another busy week for the Center for Regulatory Freedom – both in the scope and breadth of the subject areas in which we filed. It is also a useful snapshot of this center's mission. We not only react to individual rulemaking, but also actively shape the regulatory state in the direction of constitutional limits, scientific integrity and economic rationality.

These five files – on species classification, pandemic-era COVID documents, asbestos respirators, scope of the General Duty Clause and AI regulatory reform – concern different authorities, different sectors and completely different problem areas. But they all share a central theme: Washington has spent decades developing regulatory tools designed not to solve problems – but to create To gain leverage, expand power, and build a world that small businesses cannot realistically participate in.

We exist to counteract this.

We submitted comments supporting the Fish and Wildlife Service's proposal to eliminate the practice of treating an unlisted species as if it were listed under the Endangered Species Act simply because it “looks similar.”

This practice had become a convenient way to extend ESA limitations well beyond the scope of the law actually passed by Congress. It was, frankly, a regulatory fiction. As previously mentioned, there is only one standard authorized by Congress: the actual listing standard. Agencies cannot substitute their own management preference for this.

We have also advocated for better coordination with the Department of Commerce on commercial impacts. Congress called for a consideration of the economic impact – not a trade-off. Washington cannot continue to treat economic impacts as an afterthought when implementing laws, particularly in resource-dependent communities.

This act is important because it begins to restore the principle that environmental laws are not empty permits.

At OSHA, we supported removing the COVID-era reporting and record-keeping requirements in the health rule. These requirements were born in the crisis – but after the public health emergency ended, the mandates remained in the Code of Federal Regulations like an abandoned scaffolding that no one remembered to dismantle.

In our submission, we made the point as clearly as possible: the mandates no longer served a public health purpose. They no longer produced a useful signal. They simply caused costs. In the end they became a process for the sake of a process.

Ending this paperwork is not deregulation in itself. It is a recognition that rulemaking must be dynamic – it must decommission emergency instruments when the emergency has passed.

We also filed OSHA's modernization of asbestos respirator regulations – one of the most consequential “little” files in OSHA's entire regulatory universe.

Asbestos regulation has long been clouded by panic and emotional legacies rather than exposure science. OSHA's existing respirator tables were written in a different technological era—when respirators were crude, when analytical measurements were less precise, and when regulators believed that the only safe way was to specify solutions for each model.

We supported modernizing and aligning the requirements for asbestos respirators with the general respiratory protection standard as this allows selection through assigned protection factors rather than rigid tables frozen in the 1980s.

Better science, less fear and less stress are not a compromise – it is the real purpose of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in the first place.

The point we made is simple: protecting workers lies in using better data, not more fear.

The Fourth Act was an important step toward restoring constitutional boundaries within OSHA.

For decades – this is no exaggeration – OSHA has used the General Duty Clause as a quiet rulemaking workaround. Whenever the agency wanted to control an area without incurring the burden of actual notice and comment, it simply cited the employers in accordance with the clause. It became a backdoor rulebook.

OSHA has proposed, and we have strongly supported, limiting the general duty clause to hazards that are not integral, inherent characteristics of a job. If the hazard is part of the core activity of the job—live performances, motorsports, animal handling, tactical training—OSHA cannot pretend that it can eliminate the hazard.

This is a critical moment. We are now in a post-Chevron, post-Loper Bright world. Agencies no longer have a permanent interpreting license. You must adhere to the letter of the law. That means they need to go back to rulemaking, not citation replacement.

OSHA's proposed restriction protects the agency itself – from invalidation – by placing enforcement powers where Congress has actually placed them.

Finally, we submitted comments on RFI artificial intelligence regulatory reform to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The United States became a global engine of innovation because the country historically embraced a core belief: If you don't hurt people, you're free to try new things.

Europe has opted for the opposite model – pre-approval, precaution, suspicion first – and that model is now being injected into US political discourse as if fear of regulation was the safe choice.

The safe choice – the choice that keeps small businesses in the game – is permissionless innovation coupled with responsibility for actual harm. We made clear in our filing that the most important thing Washington can do is to stop turning the litigation burden into a moat that only incumbents can overcome.

We urged OSTP to seize this moment to:

• Harmonize definitions across agencies

• Attacking “Regulatory Dark Matter” – Guidance Disguised as a Binding Commitment

• Expanding the use of sandboxes, safe harbors, and outcomes-based standards

• Use AI yourself to simplify compliance and reduce paperwork.

AI policy is now a test of whether the United States still trusts its own model — or whether we will adopt a European-style regulatory stance that puts fear at the forefront and freezes out the very kind of small innovators on which the U.S. economy depends.

Last week's pass-through wasn't about the topic – wildlife, pandemic response, ventilators, legal interpretation or AI policy.

The key message was that Washington has become accustomed to developing policy sideways—by convenience, by shortcuts, by backdoor tools, and by frameworks that ignore cost-benefit discipline.

Every time this happens, a small business becomes collateral damage.

Each of last week's submissions was a push to re-anchor regulation in law, proportion, science and economic reality.