The United States just recorded its hottest summer on record, and the federal government's response has been to freeze the one rule designed to protect the workers most exposed to it. In January 2025, the White House indefinitely froze Biden-era OSHA heat safety regulations that would have mandated water, shade, breaks, training, and prevention plans. The rule sits in limbo while OSHA says it is 'reviewing comments.' Meanwhile, House Republicans are pushing legislation to prohibit the Department of Labor from enacting any workplace heat protections at all. The extraction pattern here is unusually clean. Business lobbies — agricultural and construction industry groups chief among them — fought the federal standard by claiming employers already do what the rule would mandate. Workers at a Climate Week roundtable in New York City flatly contradicted this. Donald Nesbit, executive vice-president of Local 372, described clocking 130°F to 140°F in school kitchen basements during summer. 'If we were to lock our animals in a car with those same conditions, we would be arrested,' Nesbit said. The numbers frame the scale of the failure. OSHA estimates over 550 US workers die and nearly 28,000 are injured annually from heat exposure. Heat caused more than 2,300 deaths in the US in 2023 and 2024 combined — the highest numbers in 45 years of CDC records. These are not projections; they are body counts under existing conditions, before the hottest summer on record. The state-level picture makes the federal freeze more damaging. Only seven states have enforceable heat prevention standards. A December 2025 study in Health Affairs found California's outdoor heat protections resulted in at least a 33% reduction in heat-related workplace fatalities since 2010 — hard evidence that regulation works. Florida and Texas have moved in the opposite direction, passing legislation that prohibits local governments from enacting their own heat protections. New York City moved to fill the gap. In June, Deputy Mayor Julie Su and Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued city-level heat protections, explicitly citing the White House pullback. 'We need a federal heat standard in this country,' Su said. But municipal action is a patch, not a system — it covers one city's workers while millions in states without protections have no recourse. The structural problem is that heat exposure costs are externalized entirely onto workers' bodies while the benefits of blocking regulation accrue to employers' balance sheets. Business groups frame mandatory water breaks and shade as 'burdens.' The burden of 130°F kitchens and rooftop copper work in direct sunlight falls on Esther Minton and Donald Nesbit. The asymmetry is the story. Sheet metal worker Minton described the daily calculus: long sleeves to block sun, managing hydration, enduring port-a-potties hotter than outside temperatures. 'Your body fights hardcore to stay cool, your body fights hard to not be dehydrated,' she said. The federal government has decided that fight is hers alone.
