The Inspection That No Longer Happens: OSHA Quietly Removes Fruit And Tree-Nut Farms From Heat Enforcement

A regulatory revision becomes a policy decision the moment its consequences can be counted in bodies. On April 10, 2026, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a revised National Emphasis Program for outdoor and indoor heat-related hazards. The revision did three things at once. It eliminated the numerical inspection target that had been the principal accountability mechanism of the program since 2022. It rewrote the appendix of high-risk industries on whom the agency's compliance officers were specifically directed to focus, removing forty-six industries from the prior list and adding twenty-two new ones. And it locked the revised directive in place until April 10, 2031 — effectively determining federal worker-safety priorities on the most dangerous workplace hazard of the climate era for the rest of the current presidential term and most of the next one. Among the industries removed from the priority list was fruit and tree-nut farming. According to the most rigorous public-health study of California occupational heat fatalities, conducted using state data covering 2005 to 2021 and published in the National Library of Medicine database, thirty-two percent of all fatal and catastrophic heat-related illness cases in California occurred in the Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting industry — the highest of any sector. Of those cases, ninety-four percent involved farmworkers. The industry just removed from the federal priority inspection list is, by the available evidence, the deadliest workplace heat environment in the United States. The story ran in Fresh Fruit Portal and Civil Eats. It did not run on a single major broadcast newscast in any market in America. The bodies will be counted later. The decision that produces them has already been made.

The proximate documentary record. The original National Emphasis Program, abbreviated NEP in the agency's bureaucratic shorthand, was issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on April 8, 2022, under the Biden administration, as a direct response to a documented rise in heat-related worker fatalities and illnesses across multiple industries during the 2020 and 2021 summer heat seasons. The original directive set a specific numerical target: each regional office of the agency was expected to double its number of heat-related inspections relative to a 2017–2022 baseline. Between April 2022 and December 2024, the program produced approximately seven thousand heat-related inspections — roughly ten times the pace of the prior five-year period, in which the agency had conducted about two hundred such inspections per year. Sixty heat-related citations were issued under the Occupational Safety and Health Act's general duty clause. Nearly fourteen hundred hazard alert letters were sent to employers. Approximately fourteen hundred workers were removed from hazardous heat conditions through direct enforcement action. By any measure available to the public, the program was working. It was working specifically because the inspection target was a number the agency could be held to.

The numerical target is now gone. The April 10, 2026 revision, which the agency's press release described in studiously neutral language as "eliminating the former numerical inspection goal" and "removing outdated background information, updating links, and introducing two reorganized appendices," was characterized more directly by Civil Eats: the federal agency tasked with protecting Americans from workplace hazards had removed the specific goals that produced the increase in inspections in the first place. The revised directive also rewrote the appendix of priority industries. Compliance officers will now focus on fifty-five industries identified through Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering 2022 through 2025. Forty-six of the industries on the prior list were removed. Twenty-two new industries were added. Thirty-three were retained. Among the deletions was fruit and tree-nut farming — the operations responsible for almonds, walnuts, pistachios, citrus, stone fruit, and table grapes across California's Central Valley, Washington's Yakima Valley, Florida's citrus belt, and the orchards and groves of every state with significant tree-crop production. The newly targeted industries include hog and pig farming, animal slaughtering and processing, and greenhouse, nursery, and floriculture production. The substitution is not random. It is a redirection of federal inspection attention away from open-field agricultural labor performed in extreme heat by predominantly immigrant and undocumented workforces, toward indoor and confined-operation industries whose workforce profiles look different, and whose employer trade associations have lobbied differently.

The agency, asked to explain the removal, did not. The press release simply noted that the list had been "updated essentially based on the following data": high numbers and incidence rates of heat-related illnesses from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, elevated days-away cases, severe-case reports of death or hospitalization, and prior agency enforcement actions. The methodology, on its face, is reasonable. The result, in context, is not. There is no plausible reading of the public-health literature on occupational heat exposure in which fruit and tree-nut farming is less risky than department-store retail or air transportation. The two PMC-indexed peer-reviewed analyses available on this question concluded, separately, that crop production has the highest rate of heat-related illness compensation claims of any industry sector, and that the agricultural industry has the highest heat-related mortality rate of any major industry nationwide. The BLS data the agency cites contains acknowledged systematic undercount of agricultural fatalities, because the workers who die are disproportionately undocumented, the families do not file complaints, and the deaths are frequently coded as "natural causes" or "cardiac event" rather than heat. The methodology was reasonable. The methodology was also chosen to produce the result. The fruit and tree-nut industry is not in the data because the deaths in the fruit and tree-nut industry are not in the data.

And the substitution pattern is, on inspection, the most telling line in the entire revised directive. The industries added to the priority list are dominated by indoor and confined operations — hog and pig farming (housed in environment-controlled barns), animal slaughtering and processing (climate-controlled plant floors), greenhouse and nursery production (enclosed and partially shaded), cheese and meat processing, plastics and concrete manufacturing, department stores, air transportation, and housing services. The industries removed are dominated by open-field outdoor agriculture — fruit and tree-nut farming, selected crop-production support activities, and other outdoor agricultural subsectors that have been the subject of the most extensive peer-reviewed literature on occupational heat exposure precisely because their work environments are the least mitigable. The revised Appendix A explicitly reclassifies dozens of outdoor agricultural subsectors as lower-risk despite peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary. The agency's own data may have produced the reclassification. The agency's choice of metrics — calculated incidence rates from BLS data sets known to undercount the relevant fatalities, weighted by employer-reported severe injury data unlikely to capture deaths that families never reported — produced a result that the public-health literature has spent two decades documenting cannot be correct. The prior National Emphasis Program also specifically targeted the agricultural labor-contractor model, in which orchard and grove owners outsource the field workforce to third-party contractors whose compliance with heat-illness prevention plans has historically been the weakest link in the enforcement chain. With fruit and tree-nut farming removed from priority inspection, contractor compliance becomes substantially harder to enforce, because programmed inspections were the principal vehicle through which contractor practices were surfaced for citation in the first place. The chain of causation is straightforward and is now broken.

To understand what the regulatory change actually means for workers in those fields, the relevant number is the one peer-reviewed researchers have been documenting for a decade. A study indexed in PubMed Central, which examined every fatal and catastrophic heat-related illness case reported to California's occupational safety division between 2005 and 2021, found that thirty-two percent of all five hundred two such cases in the state occurred in the Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting industry — the highest of any sector by a wide margin. Of those agricultural cases, ninety-four percent involved farmworkers. The Groundwork Collaborative, citing the same body of research, has noted that agricultural workers are approximately thirty-five times more likely to die of heat illness than workers in other industries. These are not contested numbers. They are the numbers on which the entire architecture of state heat-illness prevention regulation has been built in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Minnesota — the five states that have adopted their own heat exposure standards in the absence of a federal one. The federal agency just looked at those numbers and decided that fruit and tree-nut farming is not a priority. That is the decision. That is the documentary record. That is what was published on April 10, 2026.

The California data is the rigorous case, but it is not the only case, and a federal directive properly reckons with national scope. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' own occupational fatality data shows the agricultural sector consistently producing the highest heat-related fatality rates of any major industry classification — depending on the year, between roughly twenty and thirty-five times the all-worker average. That is not an outlier finding in one state. That is the recurring pattern across every national dataset in the public-health and labor-economics literature for the past two decades, including the Park, Pankratz, and Behrer analysis published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth in 2021, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's own multi-year tracking, and the AFL-CIO's annual Death on the Job reports. The states whose fruit and tree-nut operations are now removed from federal priority inspection are exactly the states where the national-level data has been most damning: California's Central Valley (almonds, pistachios, stone fruit, table grapes), Washington's Yakima Valley (apples, cherries, hops), Florida's citrus belt (oranges, grapefruit), Arizona's southern desert agriculture, and Oregon's nursery and fruit-growing operations. Together those regions employ several hundred thousand agricultural laborers, the substantial majority undocumented, working during a summer season that climate science has now established will arrive earlier, last longer, and reach higher peak temperatures with each passing year of the climate trajectory the United States is committed to. The decision to deprioritize federal heat enforcement in those regions is, in every meaningful sense, a decision about which regions' farmworker deaths the federal worker-safety apparatus is no longer paying close attention to.

Before going further, the indispensable framing. There is no federal occupational heat standard in the United States. There has never been one. A federal heat-illness prevention rule was first formally proposed by OSHA in 2024, the result of a regulatory process initiated under the Biden administration following decades of advocacy by the United Farm Workers, the AFL-CIO, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the public-health research community. The proposed rule would require employers to develop written heat-illness prevention plans, monitor temperature, provide water and shade and rest breaks at specified heat thresholds, and acclimatize new workers gradually to extreme conditions. It would, in effect, do at the federal level what California has done since 2005 and what four other states have replicated. The Trump administration, on taking office in January 2025, did not withdraw the proposed rule. It also did not advance it. The administration extended the public comment period to October 2025, accumulated those comments, and has, as of the filing of this dispatch in late May 2026, taken no further action. There is no announced final-rule date. There is no announced timeline. There is a draft sitting in the regulatory pipeline, and a National Emphasis Program revision that just narrowed the only operative enforcement vehicle in the meantime. The combination is the policy. The policy is to leave the workers exposed and to revise the inspection priorities so that the people most likely to die do not generate the inspections most likely to prevent it.

That is the documentary record. And the documentary record alone — without any rhetorical amplification — is sufficient to establish that what just happened on April 10, 2026 is a deliberate reduction of federal enforcement attention on the workplace heat environment producing the highest mortality rates in the country. The agency did not announce it that way. The agency announced it as "directing resources where they can make the biggest impact." The trade-press summary did not announce it that way either. Sidley Austin's environmental-health brief, in the studiously professional language of a major corporate law firm advising employer clients, called it a "revision to the inspection-growth target" with "updated appendices." Haynes Boone offered employer clients a "ninety-day mandatory outreach period" before any programmed inspections begin, suggesting they "use this window for implementing or strengthening heat illness prevention measures." That is what the regulatory language sounds like when an enforcement program is being narrowed and the trade and legal press is explaining the consequences to the employers who benefit. The language is calm. The language is technical. The language is not, anywhere in any document the federal government has produced, the language a farmworker's family would use to describe what just happened.

The federal government did not announce a rollback of heat protections for farmworkers. The federal government announced a "data-driven update" to a "national emphasis program" that "eliminated the former numerical inspection goal" and "reorganized appendices." The two sentences describe the same event.

And the principle this dispatch series has been documenting through a half-dozen prior pieces applies, again, with no need for adaptation. The most horrific harms to working people in the United States have always been done where the rest of America does not look. The orchards of the Central Valley are an hour off Interstate 5 but they may as well be in another country. The almond groves of the San Joaquin Valley, the citrus belts of Florida, the apple orchards of Yakima, the cherry rows of the Pacific Northwest, the walnut and pistachio operations of the Sacramento Valley — these are the agricultural geographies on which the American food supply rests, and they are operated, in large part, by an undocumented workforce that has no realistic recourse to file an OSHA complaint, no realistic ability to organize a workplace inspection request, no legal protection from the retaliation that any complaint produces, and no political constituency that the agencies of the federal government are obligated to consider when they revise their inspection priorities. The Civil Eats reporting cited explicitly in the trade-press treatment of the April 10 revision noted that farmworker mortality data is, by general acknowledgment in the public-health research community, systematically undercounted. Many heat deaths in the fields are not reported because the workers are undocumented and the families do not want exposure to federal authorities. Many are coded as cardiac events or natural causes. Many are simply not investigated because the workplace is rural, the body is found at the end of a row, and no employer will spontaneously call the medical examiner to report the cause of a death the employer has every incentive not to be associated with.

So when the agency tasked with worker safety reviews its data and concludes that fruit and tree-nut farming should be removed from priority inspection, it is reviewing data systematically biased toward undercount, of a workforce systematically lacking the institutional voice to correct that undercount, with a methodology designed to produce a result the agency had reasons to want, in the service of an enforcement narrowing that benefits the employer trade associations that have lobbied against the federal heat standard for forty years. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is what is in the regulatory record. The decision was made the way every regulatory decision is made: through procedures and data reviews and stakeholder consultations that produce, with statistical reliability, the outcome the politically dominant stakeholders preferred. The data was bent toward the conclusion because the data is, in the agricultural-mortality sector, structurally bendable. The methodology was honored because the methodology, in this domain, is what permits the narrowing. The trade press reported it accurately. The general public will not see it because the general public does not read the trade press, and because the workers whose risk just went up are not the workers the general public can imagine.

The most rigorous evidence available on whether enforced heat standards actually save the lives the literature claims they save was published in December 2025 in Health Affairs, the peer-reviewed journal of American health policy research. Adam Dean of George Washington University and Jamie McCallum of Middlebury College compared heat-related deaths among outdoor workers in California with those in neighboring states (Arizona, Nevada, Oregon) over the period 1999 through 2020. They used negative-binomial regression with wild-cluster-bootstrapped standard errors, the appropriate technique for the sparse-event-count data the topic requires. They found that California's enforced heat standard was associated with an estimated forty-three-percent reduction in heat-related outdoor-worker deaths relative to comparable counties in those neighboring states across the full enforcement period. They found, more specifically, a thirty-three-percent reduction after enforcement of the original 2005 California rule intensified in 2010 (the conservative estimate) and a fifty-one-percent reduction after the 2015 rule revisions strengthened the regulatory framework (the optimistic estimate). The reductions were jointly statistically significant. The natural-experiment design controlled for climate, regional economic conditions, and the structural composition of agricultural labor markets across the four-state cluster. The findings were precisely the kind of evidence the federal regulatory process is supposed to weigh when deciding whether to promulgate a federal standard or narrow an enforcement program. The federal government was, on April 10, 2026, in possession of the Dean and McCallum results. The federal government chose, on April 10, 2026, to narrow the inspection priorities in the industry most directly affected by them.

And the economic frame matters here, because the industry whose priority inspection was just removed is not a marginal sliver of the American agricultural economy. California alone produces approximately eighty percent of the United States' almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and several other tree-nut categories, plus large fractions of national stone-fruit, table-grape, and citrus output. The fruit and tree-nut sector is, by farm-gate value, a multi-billion-dollar industry whose workforce is concentrated in a small number of high-temperature agricultural regions during the specific months of summer when the operations are most labor-intensive and the heat is most extreme. The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, which killed Sebastian Francisco Perez, a twenty-four-year-old nursery worker in Oregon, on a one-hundred-eight-degree day at an Ernst Nursery near Salem — and produced casualties across other outdoor labor sites that summer — was the immediate catalyst that produced the original 2022 National Emphasis Program. The Biden-era OSHA created the directive precisely because conditions like the 2021 heat dome were predicted by the climate science to recur with increasing frequency and severity, and because the existing enforcement architecture was demonstrably inadequate to the new temperature regime. The 2026 summer season has, as of the filing of this dispatch, just begun. The conditions that killed Sebastian Francisco Perez in 2021 will, on the consensus climate trajectory, recur with rising frequency through the entire five-year duration of the revised directive that just removed fruit and tree-nut farming from priority inspection. The Civil Eats article noted that the General Duty Clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act still permits citation of any employer for any worker hurt or killed by heat exposure. That is technically correct. It is also, in practice, dependent on the existence of an inspection that triggers the citation. The inspections that would have triggered those citations are the inspections the revised NEP just removed.

The fairest version of the agency's case for the revision deserves to be engaged on its merits. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is, and has been for decades, a chronically underfunded and understaffed regulator with jurisdiction over millions of workplaces and resources adequate to inspect a small fraction of them in any given year. The argument that compliance officer time is finite, that data should drive inspection priorities, and that an honest reading of the most recent four years of BLS information should govern which industries receive programmed inspection attention — that argument, taken on its face, is the same argument every reasonable regulator would make about resource allocation. The problem is what the original NEP itself demonstrated. With a numerical target and an open-field agricultural priority list, the agency conducted approximately seven thousand heat-related inspections between April 2022 and December 2024 — roughly ten times the prior pace. It issued sixty citations. It sent fourteen hundred hazard alert letters. It removed fourteen hundred workers from active hazardous heat exposure. The constrained-resource agency, under the original directive, generated those results. The constrained-resource agency, under the revised directive, will generate fewer of them. The resource-allocation argument explains why some priority must be set. It does not explain why fruit and tree-nut farming — the open-field agricultural sector with the most extensively documented occupational heat fatality rate in the country — was the priority that had to be relaxed. The revision's defenders have not, to the filing of this dispatch, produced an answer to that question that survives the peer-reviewed evidence.

And so the dispatch arrives at the question. Who profits? The list for this revision is shorter than the list for Sudan or Mali, but it is no less specific. What follows is the ledger.

That is the cui bono. And the principle holds, with the same terrible clarity it has held in every prior dispatch in this series. The most horrific harms to working people in the United States have always been done where the rest of America does not look. The orchards are dark in the operational sense the series has been documenting. They are dark not because the conditions are not documented — the conditions are extensively documented — but because the documentation lives in trade press, in peer-reviewed public health journals, in state occupational health divisions, in the case files of the United Farm Workers, and in the medical examiner reports of rural counties whose summer mortality spikes are not, generally, the lead story on any major broadcast network. The April 10 NEP revision is the kind of decision that produces deaths by removing the inspections that would have prevented them, that is structured to evade public attention by being technical, and that is timed to take effect before the summer heat season in a way that ensures the consequences will be measurable only in retrospect, by which point the news cycle will have moved on and the directive will have five years left to run. The omission, again, is the asset. The deaths, again, will be counted later. The accountability list, again, can be written now.

What does accountability look like, on this ledger? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is accountable for the methodology by which fruit and tree-nut farming was removed from the priority list, for the elimination of the numerical inspection target that gave the program its public accountability, for the five-year duration of a directive that will outlast the current presidential term, and for the absence of a final federal heat standard whose proposed status it has had under continuous consideration for nearly two years. The Department of Labor, of which OSHA is a component agency, is accountable for the regulatory posture that produced the revision and for the political calculation that the bodies it will cost can be politically absorbed. The Trump administration is accountable for the decision to leave the proposed federal heat standard in draft status, for the decision to extend the comment period without further action, and for the choice of administrative narrowing as the deregulatory vehicle. The fruit-growing and tree-nut trade associations are accountable for the lobbying that produced the political conditions in which the revision was made, and for the continued operational reliance on undocumented workforces under conditions the public-health literature describes as among the most dangerous in the American economy. The major broadcast networks and major newspapers are accountable for treating a national worker-safety enforcement narrowing as a trade-press story. The state agencies of the twenty-eight state-plan jurisdictions are accountable for what they choose to do by the June 9 notification deadline. The American consumer of fruit and tree-nut products is accountable, more diffusely, for the supply chain that produces them under these conditions. None of those actors will hold themselves to account. The dispatch is naming them. Naming is what comes before accounting.

None of those actions will, by themselves, bring back a worker who dies in an almond orchard in July 2026 because the inspection that would have caught the absent shade structure no longer occurs as a programmed priority. The dispatch is not pretending otherwise. The argument is the one this column has been making for several pieces now: that a policy reported as a technical update will be misread for as long as it is reported that way, and that a regulatory narrowing is almost always a yield, paid out to specific actors whose interests can be traced. The fruit and tree-nut industry just received a five-year payout from the federal worker-safety agency. The payout was announced in language designed to evade public attention. The workers who will pay for the payout will pay in heatstroke, in renal failure, in cardiac arrest at the end of a row in the middle of a heat advisory day, in the rural medical examiner reports that do not generate national headlines, and in the families who will not, in many cases, even know that the inspection that might have saved their husband or father or son was, in April of 2026, formally deprioritized.

The dispatch ends where the regulatory record ends. On April 10, 2026, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration eliminated the numerical inspection target that had produced approximately seven thousand heat-related inspections over thirty-three months, removed fruit and tree-nut farming from the priority industry list it had occupied since 2022, and locked the revised directive (CPL 03-00-024) in place until April 10, 2031. The federal heat standard remains proposed and unfinalized. The 2026 summer heat season is already underway. The inspections that might have prevented the next orchard death are, by the published terms of the revised directive, now structurally less likely to occur. Somewhere in California's Central Valley, Washington's Yakima Valley, Florida's citrus belt, Arizona's southern desert, or Oregon's nursery operations, a farmworker is going to die in the next four months in conditions an inspection might have prevented. The decision that the inspection no longer happens has already been made. The decision was made in writing. The decision was published. The decision was reported in the trade press. And the decision will, when the body is found at the end of a row in an orchard that should have been inspected, be the answer to the question of why no one was looking.