GovernmentExecutive.com

The New York Times reports today on the Bush administration's regulatory approach, particularly at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "Across Washington," the story says, "political appointees — often former officials of the industries they now oversee — have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers." Bush appointees, it adds, "favor a 'voluntary compliance strategy,' reaching agreements with industry associations and companies to police themselves."

What the story doesn't say is that the voluntary compliance strategy long predates the Bush administration, especially at OSHA. Clinton administration officials began to adopt this approach 15 years ago, when it became apparent that their efforts to cut the size of the federal workforce were inconsistent with the idea of maintaining a huge federal regulatory and enforcement bureaucracy. Here's what Peter Hutchinson and David Osborne had to say about OSHA's efforts in Government Executive in 2000:

In 1992, OSHA officials in Maine pioneered a remarkably successful partnership called the Maine 200 Program. Its leaders were frustrated by the failure of their traditional inspect-and-fine approach: Although they won gold medals from headquarters for issuing the most citations and fines, the state's workplace safety and health records remained the worst in the nation. So they decided to try something different: They asked the 200 employers with the highest volume of injury claims (45 percent of the state's total) to create employee teams dedicated to improving safety. The teams would draw up action plans, conduct comprehensive surveys of hazards in their plants, and correct most of them within 12 months. As long as the company was making a good-faith effort, OSHA would forgo its traditional inspections and fines. But each quarter the employers had to file a report on their progress, and OSHA would visit occasionally to verify those reports. Employers who failed to fulfill their obligations would be subject to comprehensive inspections.

The Maine 200 effort won wide praise, and OSHA tried to take it nationwide in 1997. But the agency was forced to abandon that effort two years later, because the program was successfully challenged in court by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- and not on the grounds that it was too lenient in regulating businesses.