Word: auchter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Interior Secretary James Watt, who once headed a private Colorado group fighting federal restrictions on oil exploration in the West, is only the best known of Reagan's "fox in the chicken coop" administrators. Before he was named head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Thome Auchter served as spokesman for a construction company owned by his family that had been cited 48 times by OSHA for safety violations. Two lobbies that have fought hard against meat inspections now have former executives high in the Agriculture Department: Assistant Secretary C.W. McMillan of the National Cattlemen's Association...
...Auchter insists that his agency's job "is not to issue fines; it's to reduce injury and illness." He concedes that there may be fewer inspections but explains that his inspectors are concentrating on those companies with bad safety records. Overall, Auchter insists, OSHA is achieving "more with less." Indeed, workplace injury and illness rates are down slightly under the Reagan Administration, though critics attribute the decline to high joblessness during the recession...
Some career employees at OSHA pay Auchter a backhanded compliment, saying that without him the agency would have fared "substantially worse" under Reagan. A critic, Democratic Congressman David Obey, member of a subcommittee dealing with health, admits that OSHA has "shown surface movement in the past three months," but contends that it is only because "Auchter doesn't want to wind up in the same boat...
...Health Administration. This ten-year-old agency has been the embodiment of runaway regulation. Over the years, OSHA has issued thousands of health-and safety-related rules, right down to specifying the design of stepladders and the location of fire extinguishers in factories. Under Reagan Appointee Thorne G. Auchter, 36, a Florida construction executive, OSHA is changing direction. Auchter promises to stress cost-benefit analysis as the means of achieving the Government's goal at the lowest cost to companies. Says he: "We don't want to end all regulation, but we want to end excessive, unnecessary, unfounded...