OSHA restructures: increased outreach, new office for small business

August 30, 2002—The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has announced a restructuring and realignment of the Agency. The reorganization features the creation of a new Office of Small Business, which will be part of an overall change in the Agency’s structure that for the first time will establish a separate organization in OSHA to coordinate compliance assistance activities.

The new dedicated compliance assistance organization, the Directorate of Cooperative and State Programs, formalizes OSHA’s efforts to expand compliance programs, training, outreach, and education programs, and create an organization that builds on and expands the knowledge and successes of the compliance assistance programs currently in place. In addition to the new Office of Small Business Assistance, other new offices created by the reorganization include the Office of Partnerships and Recognition and the Office of Outreach Services and Alliances, both designed to reach out to the business and employer communities.

A second feature of the restructuring is the consolidation of the Directorates of Safety and Health Standards into one unified organization that will address both regulatory and non-regulatory approaches for safety and health standards and guidelines. This change streamlines OSHA rulemaking by integrating all safety and health standards development activity within one organization. The agency will also rename its Directorate of Compliance Programs as the Directorate of Enforcement to clarify and emphasize the strong enforcement that will continue to be pursued under the new restructuring.

Other changes taking place under the restructuring plan include replacing the Directorate of Policy with the Directorate of Evaluation and Analysis to better monitor and measure the agency’s performance and to track its progress against strategic objectives, and changing the name of the Directorate of Technical Support to the Directorate of Science, Technology and Medicine.

More details about the restructuring can be found on the OSHA fact sheet.

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