The United States Court of Appeals for The Sixth Circuit says it does.
More than fifty years ago, Congress passed, and President Nixon signed into law, the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act, 29 U.S.C. § 651 et seq. Throughout the next half century, challenges to the constitutionality of the Act have been uniformly rejected. See Nat’l Mar. Safety Ass’n v. Occupational Safety & Health Admin., 649 F.3d 743 (D.C. Cir. 2011), cert. denied, 566 U.S. 936 (2012); Blocksom & Co. v. Marshall, 582 F.2d 1122 (7th Cir. 1978).
This case presents the same simple but poignant challenge: whether Congress’s delegation to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to set workplace-safety standards is constitutional. Plaintiff Allstates Refractory Contractors, a general contractor subject to OSHA’s oversight, challenges OSHA’s authority to set “reasonably necessary or appropriate” workplace-safety standards, 29 U.S.C. §§ 652(8), 655(b), as a violation of the nondelegation doctrine. The district court concluded that the delegation provided an “intelligible principle” and thus rejected Allstates’s challenge. We agree and now join our sister circuits in holding OSHA’s delegation to be constitutional.
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In this facial challenge to the OSH Act against the relevant governmental defendants, Allstates contends that, because the only textual constraint on setting workplace-safety standards is that they be “reasonably necessary or appropriate,” 29 U.S.C. § 652(8), OSHA does not have the constitutional authority to set those standards under § 655(b) and employers do not have a duty to comply with OSHA’s standards under § 654(a). In the district court, it moved for summary judgment, requesting a permanent nationwide injunction. But, instead, the district court granted the government’s cross motion for summary judgment. The court concluded that the “reasonably necessary or appropriate” standard provided an “intelligible principle” to satisfy the nondelegation doctrine because the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld similar delegations; so the court “decline[d]” Allstates’s “invitation” to “disregard these precedents.” Allstates Refractory Contractors, LLC v. Walsh, 625 F. Supp. 3d 676, 681–84 (N.D. Ohio 2022).
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