Public protections · workers
Federal workplace-safety inspectors, by president
The number of federal OSHA inspectors, the people who check that workplaces are safe, at the end of each administration, from the AFL-CIO's annual tally. The agency has been chronically understaffed for its entire fifty-five-year history, so the count sits in a narrow band; what stands out is the record low it reached in 2025.
Inspector counts are a proxy, and reflect budgets Congress sets. The number of inspectors is a rough measure of enforcement capacity, not of workplace safety directly, and it is bounded by the funding Congress appropriates as well as by administration priorities. Federal OSHA covers roughly half the states (about 155 million workers); the rest run their own state plans, not counted here. The band across administrations is narrow because the agency has been thinly staffed for decades; the 2025 figure is notable for breaking below that band to a record low. Trump II is a partial term, with fiscal 2025 its first complete data year.