Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, LITIGATION NEWS, TRENDS—Texas produce association challenges OSHA’s rulemaking authority as unconstitutional delegation, (Dec 5, 2025)
Organizations Mentioned:Southeastern Legal Foundation
By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.
“For decades, OSHA has relied on... open-ended language to regulate nearly every corner of the American economy—from office settings to retail shops to small family businesses—without meaningful limits from Congress.”
According to a lawsuit announced this week by Texas-based agricultural trade associations, including the Texas International Produce Association, Congress’s delegation of legislative power to the Executive Branch by way of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) violates the nondelegation doctrine.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, along with the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF), represent the two trade organizations whose members work across the fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain, including, according to the Foundations, many small and family-owned businesses. “Both trade organizations and their members—along with virtually every other employer in America—must comply with costly, complex, and ever-expanding OSHA rules,” they contend, “even though Congress never made the fundamental policy judgments those rules require.”
“If Congress wants OSHA to regulate every workplace in America,” they state, “it must make those basic policy choices itself—not hand the agency a blank check to decide how much safety is ‘enough,’ what risks justify billions in compliance costs, or which businesses must shoulder those burdens.”
Non-delegation violation alleged. Specifically, the lawsuit asks whether Congress violated the non-delegation doctrine when it gave the Secretary of Labor “the power to set workplace safety standards under 29 U.S.C. § 655(b) (the safety standards delegation).”
The associations rely upon the “intelligible principles” test from J. W. Hampton, Jr., & Co. v. United States, 276 U.S. 394, 409 (1928), arguing that the test “demands that Congress make clear both ‘the general policy’ for the agency to pursue and ‘the boundaries of [its] delegated authority’” but that the “safety standards delegation contains no intelligible principle.”
The complaint was filed in the Northern District of Texas; the case is No. 2:25-cv-00261-Z.
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