Recommended in 1972

I ran a check today to see if I’d missed any products in the last 30 days, and these are the ones that were surfaced:

• IF13290 Department of Transportation (DOT) and Transit-Oriented Development: Options for Congress (08/18)

• IN11701 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Regulation of Employee Exposure to Heat (08/18)

• IF13286 Project Labor Agreements and Executive Order 14063 (08/12)

• 96-264 Frequently Asked Questions About Tax-Exempt Organizations (08/07)

• R49105 Lapses in DHS Appropriations: History and Plans (08/07)

• R49070 Regulation of Hazardous Air Pollutants Under the Clean Air Act: A Primer (08/04)

• IN12718 FY2027 NDAA: Military Service Academy Athletics and Professional Sports (07/24)

• LSB11351 High Court Rejects Private Challenges to Medicaid Provider Requirements (07/24)

• IF12055 The U.S. DOT Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program (07/24)

• LSB11461 Natural Gas Appliances, Energy Policy, and Federalism: Who Is in Charge? (07/20)

Unfortunately, I’m not going to be covering them retroactively at this time. I will attempt to figure out why they were missed the first time however. Was it me? Was it retroactive publishing? For a moment I thought perhaps I didn’t report on any July 24 items, since I appear to have missed three. But nope, I reported on ten July 24 items.

Small batch today covering workplace heat safety, Golden Dome updates, transit-oriented development, and another U.S.-China tariffs update.

Title: Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Regulation of Employee Exposure to Heat

Report No. IN11701 | Type: Insight | Date: August 18, 2026, version 11
CRS Author(s): Scott D. Szymendera, Specialist in Disability Policy | Official Congress.gov copy

It is the middle of August and the federal government has no occupational standard for heat. Not for roofers, not for farmworkers, not for the people working in bakeries, warehouses, and steel mills, where the heat is indoors and year-round.

OSHA proposed one. The notice of proposed rulemaking went out on August 30, 2024, drew more than 43,000 public comments, and got a virtual public hearing in June and July of 2025, with comments accepted through October 30. Since then the agency has taken no further action on it. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the federal research body that studies workplace hazards, first recommended a heat standard in 1972. The statute lets it recommend; it does not require OSHA to act.

Without a standard, enforcement runs through the general duty clause, which obligates employers to keep workplaces free of recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm. That is the first of OSHA’s two heat tools, and it only works backward: an inspector has to build a case that this particular employer knew this particular heat was dangerous.

The second is the National Emphasis Program, which is a directive to OSHA’s own inspectors rather than a rule binding on employers. It names the industries where heat injuries are most likely, based on injury and violation data, and tells regional offices to go inspect those workplaces on a schedule instead of waiting for a complaint or a body. It also sets how hard to push. Between 2022 and 2025 it produced about 2,400 heat inspections a year, roughly 6% of all federal OSHA inspections, about 50 of them each year following a possible workplace fatality.

In April 2026, OSHA under the Second Trump Administration cancelled the 2022 program and replaced it with one running through April 2031. The 2022 version told each region to double its heat inspections against a FY2017–FY2021 baseline. The 2026 version sets no inspection target at all. It also rebuilt the industry list using newer data, dropping 46, keeping 33, adding 22, for a net loss of 24.

Federal deaths data put the toll at 48 in 2024 and an annual average of 42 across 2011 through 2024.

Four states—California, Maryland, Nevada, and Oregon—regulate both indoor and outdoor heat. Washington covers outdoor only, Minnesota indoor only, and Colorado, which has no state plan at all, regulates outdoor heat in agriculture separately. State plans are encouraged but not required to adopt the 2026 NEP.

H.R. 4443 and S. 2298, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act of 2025,1 would compel OSHA to write the standard. Both are named for a California farmworker who died of heat stroke in 2004. Both were introduced on July 16, 2025, and referred to committee—Education and Workforce in the House, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in the Senate. Neither has had a hearing or a markup since. An earlier version of the same bill was marked up and ordered reported by the House committee in July 2022.

Two things happened to heat policy at OSHA, and only one of them required anybody’s permission. The rulemaking is the participatory instrument: 43,000 comments, a public hearing, and nothing at all since the record closed in October 2025. The National Emphasis Program is the unilateral one—an internal directive, no notice, no comment period, no vote—and in April it was cancelled and rewritten, shedding the inspection target and 24 industries off the list inspectors are told to prioritize.

The general duty clause remains and one case shows its ceiling. A willful violation, an employee exposure CRS quotes as excessive heat and thermal stress in a cane field, resulted in a final penalty under $82,000 after settlement. That is the deterrent.

Congress has a bill sitting in both chambers that would take the discretion away. It has been sitting there since July 2025, in committees that have not scheduled it.

Title: The U.S. Army and the Golden Dome Program

Report No. IF13264 | Type: In Focus | Date: August 18, 2026, version 42
CRS Author(s): Andrew Feickert, Specialist in Military Ground Forces; Hannah D. Dennis, Analyst in U.S. Defense Policy; Robert Holcombe, U.S. Army Fellow | Official Congress.gov copy

WCSBR covered version 1 on July 9. The budget figures haven’t moved. Version 4 adds a first operational site and a first Army unit, and removes the section that asked where the people to run them would come from.

In August 2026, General Michael Guetlein announced that the Pentagon had established Golden Dome’s first operational site at Fort Story, Virginia—the same installation where Army systems were put on display in April. The stated purpose is to place homeland missile defense elements on the East Coast, with population centers including New York City and Washington eventually protected against cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons, and other advanced threats. Guetlein did not identify additional locations, say how many sites the nationwide architecture will need, or name any systems or units bound for Fort Story.

The Army has also selected its first unit: battalion-sized, drawn from existing force structure, with elements from other echelons. CRS does not name it because the Army has not. The systems it will operate were not identified either. The plan, as reported, is experimentation and testing.

Both facts reached CRS by press report.

Nothing in the budget picture changed. The FY2027 request still asks $17.5 billion for the Golden Dome fund, 98% of it as mandatory funding routed through reconciliation, with THAAD and PAC-3 MSE procurement at 92% and 89% mandatory. Guetlein’s $185 billion through 2035 and CBO’s $1.2 trillion over 20 years still sit next to each other, still unreconciled.

Read the deletions.

Version 1 asked whether the Army National Guard could supply Golden Dome’s people. It listed the three Guard air defense brigades—Florida’s 164th, Ohio’s 174th, South Carolina’s 678th—noted that Colorado’s Guard 100th Missile Defense Brigade already operates the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, and floated converting some or all three of the short-range brigades into Golden Dome units as a way to build the force without increasing Army end strength. That section is gone from version 4. So is the general stationing issue, which would have had Congress review where new units go, what military construction they require, and what the effects are on the communities hosting them; three questions about Fort Story specifically now sit roughly where it did. The Government Accountability Office finding on cyber and other high-skill workforce gaps is gone too, along with the discussion of training pipelines, soldier incentives, and force management policy.

The program gained a site and a unit and the document shed the questions about how to man and place everything after them. That is a narrower report about a wider program.

Title:Department of Transportation (DOT) and Transit-Oriented Development: Options for Congress

Report No. IF13290 | Type: In Focus | Date: August 18, 2026, version 1
CRS Author(s): William J. Mallett, Specialist in Transportation Policy | Official Congress.gov copy

Transit-oriented development means housing, shops, and offices built close enough to a train or bus station that people can actually use it. The Federal Transit Administration has a working definition. Congress has never written one into law. Because these projects run on private money and local zoning, the federal role is small by design—which has not stopped the Transportation Department from promoting them since the 1990s.

The tools available: transit agencies can partner with private developers on projects around their own stations, which has counted as eligible transit capital spending since 2005; the department’s main competitive grant program for new rail and bus rapid transit lines scores applicants partly on whether the surrounding zoning and housing policy supports development; a small planning grant program, funded at roughly $14 million a year, pays for the land use planning that goes with those lines; two federal loan programs, one covering highways and transit and one covering railroads, can finance the buildings themselves; and since 2021 transit agencies have been able to hand federally funded property to a local government or nonprofit if it will be used for development that includes affordable housing.

The loan programs are the striking part. The highway and transit program has made one loan of this kind in its history: $27 million for a public library beside a multimodal hub in Mount Vernon, Washington, that includes an Amtrak station. The railroad program has made none. There is also no accounting of what the 2021 property transfer authority has produced.

As for where the bills are: the requirement that the housing and transit agencies coordinate on affordable housing grants is already law. The surface transportation reauthorization that cleared the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in May would raise the planning program to $15 million a year, drop the word “pilot” from its name, add development to the railroad loan program’s list of priorities, and exempt private land bought for these projects from environmental review. Everything else is in committee, including the Build HUBS Act, whose environmental review language the reauthorization has already picked up, and the NO TOD Act, which would end the planning program and strip both loan programs of the authority to fund these projects at all. A version of the NO TOD Act has now been introduced in three consecutive Congresses.

Can we all just acknowledge what a magical place it must be, having a public library in a multimodal hub with an Amtrak station? SO many places to enjoy a book!

One loan and one library. Every tool in this report is indirect—grant scoring, planning money, loan eligibility, property transfers—because these projects run on private development and local land use regulation, neither of which the federal government controls. Congress is currently weighing both an expansion of the loan programs and a bill to strip transit-oriented development out of them entirely. The provision most likely to change what actually gets built near a station is the grant scoring criterion, and it is already sitting in the reauthorization that cleared committee in May.

Title: U.S.-China Tariff Actions Since 2018: An Overview

Report No. IF12990 | Type: In Focus | Date: August 18, 2026, version 15
CRS Author(s): Karen M. Sutter, Specialist in Asian Trade and Finance | Official Congress.gov copy

WCSBR covered version 13 on August 17. Two figures in that post are already superseded: upholstered furniture is 25%, not 30%, and cabinets are 25%, not 50%. Both were revised in version 15, in the text and in Figure 1. The count of open Section 232 investigations is now four, not five.

The average rates did not move, but the sector list did. Drones came off the ongoing investigation list and onto the tariff list at 25%–100%, in a category where China is the second-largest U.S. source, leaving four investigations open—wind turbines, medical supplies, robotics, and anthracite coal. And the lumber-sector rates came down, with upholstered furniture and cabinets both landing at 25%.

That is nearly the whole update, published four days after the last version was. This serves as a reminder that the tariff schedule is being revised faster than the reference works describing it, and that the reference works are what Congress is reading.

I read the version history so you don't have to.

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AI Disclosure: This post was produced with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5. Claude ran prior-coverage checks, proposed triage and tier assignments, drafted the metadata blocks, figure alt text and caption, and wrote all initial body drafts. Charlie Amiot provided source documents, differentials, set tier assignments and running order, wrote the opener and footnotes, repeatedly rejected and redirected framing, and revised at the paragraph level throughout. Claude verified the legislative status of the bills discussed and fact-checked the finished post against the source documents under close supervision. Charlie Amiot holds final responsibility for all accuracy and editorial judgment in this post. AI use is disclosed in every post.