Federal Role Research Articles

The Federal Role in Education and the Rise of Social Science Research

Studies of the rise of social science research in education typically focus on the Progressive Era, from 1890 to 1930, the period in which the American Educational Research Association (AERA) was founded. As central as this story is to the intellectual history of education as a field, however, it obscures an earlier set of events that arguably is even more important to understanding why AERA and the larger progressive education research enterprise of which it was a part developed when and how they did. That episode was the major but ultimately failed effort of the 1870s and 1880s to establish a national education system in the United States. This chapter focuses on the use of social science research in this earlier episode of education reform. It reveals how the rise of education research during the Progressive Era, and ultimately the founding of AERA, responded to the failure of this earlier effort in multiple ways. More precisely, it shows how social science research in education developed historically in relation to the peculiarly decentralized and racialized structure of education authority and policy in the United States.

The Personal and Political Postwar American Family

THE PATHOLOGICAL FAMILY: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy. By Deborah Weinstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013.COLD WAR KIDS: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945-1960. By Marilyn Irvin Holt. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2014.EVERYBODY ELSE: Adoption and the Politics of Domesticity in Postwar America. By Sarah Potter. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. 2014.The proposition of 1960s radical feminism that the personal is (always) political notwithstanding, how the relationship between the private and the public is understood and experienced is shaped by particular historical conditions and changes over time. Undergirded by this premise, Marilyn Irvin Holt's Cold War Kids, Deborah Weinstein's The Pathological Family, and Sarah Potter's Every- body Else are all concerned with mapping the shifting conceptual and material boundaries between the family and society from 1945 to 1960 in the United States. Collectively examining the ideas, initiatives, and experiences of wide array of historical actors-from federal policy makers to scientific experts to adoptive and foster parents from diverse class and racial backgrounds-these three historians convincingly contend that the supposedly private realms of childhood and the family attained heightened public and political significance in the postwar period, with important ramifications for both family life and American politics that have continued to resonate into our own time.Cold War Kids thoroughly documents the growing involvement by the federal government in fostering the health, education, and welfare of American children from across the social spectrum during the fifteen years following World War II. Although local and state governments to assume some responsibility for children's welfare beginning in the nineteenth century and federal policy makers expressed interest in children's issues during the Progressive era, the 1920s, and the New Deal years, legislation addressing child labor and the needs of dependent children targeted only the most socially and economically marginalized. It was not until after World War II, Marilyn Holt explains, that the federal government began to consider America's youth as one collective group (8), thereby marking the postwar era as crucial turning point (2) in the history of childhood. Indeed, in contrast to those historians of childhood and of twentieth-century American politics who have characterized the postwar years as period of inertia in between the governmental welfare activism of the Progressive era/New Deal, on the one hand, and the Great Society, on the other, Holt reveals the post-World War II years to be a pivotal period in which the federal government's role in issues related to America's youth was hotly debated, periodically challenged, sometimes championed, and slowly expanded (2-3).Through her examination of presidential speeches, records from congressional debates and investigations, and reports issued by White House conferences and presidential commissions, Holt demonstrates that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, members of their administrations, members of Congress, and public servants in an array of federal agencies became prominent participants in the growing public discourse about children and family life that characterized the postwar years. Federal government officials were motivated to speak up and act on behalf of children by whole array of developments, sensibilities, and concerns familiar to scholars of the postwar period, including: longings for familial and social stability following the Depression and World War II, confidence in the booming economy, anxieties about the survival of democracy and capitalism spurred by the Cold War, angst about rising rates of working women and juvenile delinquency, the prevalence of racial discrimination and the burgeoning civil rights movement, national housing crisis, and the sheer numbers of young people in the population putting demands on educational and welfare systems that families, local communities, and state governments could not meet on their own. …

The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers

Reviewed by: The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark Wahlgren Summers J. Matthew Gallman The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction. By Mark Wahlgren Summers. Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. x, 517. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-1757-2.) It has been more than a quarter century since Eric Foner published Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988). Previously, competing schools of scholars had produced dramatically different treatments of the postwar decades, developing a rich historiography that tended to focus on large moral and ethical judgments and conflicting perspectives on how white men in power treated the South’s freedpeople. Foner’s book recast that conversation by putting African Americans at the center of the narrative, both as historical actors exercising substantial agency and as human victims of unspeakable horrors. Since 1988 many historians have added new dimensions to our understanding of Reconstruction, but Foner’s formulation of Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution” in search of racial justice remains paramount. In his new synthesis Mark Wahlgren Summers draws a valuable distinction between what Foner accomplished and how he intended to tell the story. By “placing the struggle for equality and a meaningful freedom at its center,” Foner created a powerful history that “speaks … to our time” (p. 3). But Summers has some doubts about whether Foner’s framework “speaks quite [End Page 455] as well to their time” (p. 3). This question calls to mind recent debates about the central motivations of the North during the war years. Was it a war for emancipation, or was it a war for Union, with emancipation becoming an important—but still secondary—goal? Most victorious northerners wished to see the restoration of the Union. Talk of “equal rights” came fairly late in the game and—although certainly a goal shared by many—visions of racial equality were never as central to popular thinking as the return to a republic of largely independent states, free of the evils of slavery. Summers is deft at telling this complex political story, with attention to the great diversity among southern states and the significance of national events and colorful individuals in shaping the narrative. A superb spinner of tales, Summers loves yarns about unscrupulous crooks and ironic twists challenging preconceived notions. The prose is excellent, sprinkled with clever puns that a more stodgy editor might have overruled. The result is a book that sometimes reads as if one were sitting across the table from a hugely informed and amusing fellow, sharing a beer and telling stories about politics. In this world where individuals and events matter, the disappointing results of Reconstruction were not preordained, even if they were reasonably predictable. Southern white conservatives were happiest to cooperate with some modest social reforms, and even with black voters, when they were enjoying economic prosperity. But when markets soured, the shallowness of their interest in racial equality became evident. Northerners were appropriately aghast at some developments in the old Confederacy, and a federal military presence really did produce positive results for freedpeople on occasion, but the nation’s enduring commitment to a federal role in supposedly independent states proved similarly thin. In an explicit dissent from familiar periodization, Summers sees Redemption as essentially complete by 1873, with the celebrated election of 1876 little more than a fascinating coda. The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction is an important book, full of details and insights, and it deserves serious attention. It is not really a criticism to return to where Summers began, with the observation that while Foner wrote for “our time,” he perhaps did not fully capture “their” time. Summers thus makes the important point that contemporaries understood Reconstruction as a “postscript to the war” and not as the start of a “revolution” (p. 3). But “their,” in Summers’s book, does seem to be limited to the men (nearly all white) who held the power, read the important newspapers, and made the vital decisions. In that context, the intricacies of sharecropping—to suggest just one topic—receive modest attention, either as a...

Using the Oldest Military Force for the Newest National Defense

The National Guard is establishing Cyber Mission Teams (CMT) that will fulfill a federal role to backfill active duty defending Department of Defense networks, but are also exploring how they could effectively fulfill state missions. The President, Council of Governors, and USCYBERCOM Commander have expressed concerns about U.S. critical infrastructure cyber network vulnerabilities and the increasing magnitude of threat our adversaries pose to those networks’ security. This article explores using this emerging National Guard capability in a state role for protection of critical infrastructure cyber networks. Most of the critical infrastructure is privately owned. Although current executive orders and policy mandate government sharing of This article is available in Journal of Strategic Security: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol8/iss4/1 cyber threat information, private providers’ reciprocation of sharing their vulnerabilities is voluntary. This article contends that effective cyber defense requires strong private-public partnerships. We developed a critical infrastructure cyber defense model based upon key characteristics from the literature on private-public partnerships and performed a case study of current cyber defense partnerships to validate the model. Our research shows this model to be a useful guide for emerging National Guard Cyber Mission Forces to consider when establishing partnerships for effective critical infrastructure cyber defense. This article is available in Journal of Strategic Security: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol8/iss4/1

Washington View

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is leaving after seven years. His legacy is likely to include important policy gains, including a focus on higher standard that may have helped raise graduation rates in recent years, and some missteps as well, such as his ill-timed, headlong approach to using high-stakes tests in teacher evaluations for the purpose of improving teaching. Still he leaves at a time when the federal role in education has not been fully and clearly worked out.

Immigration Federalism as Ideology: Lessons from the States

Over the last decade states passed hundreds of immigration bills covering a range of policy areas. This article considers the recent state legislative surge against scholarly treatments of immigration federalism, and identifies the symbolic politics in state lawmaking. The analysis combines a historical treatment of key court decisions that delineated boundaries of state and federal immigration roles with a legislative analysis of over 2200 immigration bills passed between 2006 and 2013, to identify the numerous ways in which national immigration policy shapes state measures. It argues that recent laws must be considered against symbolic federalism which privileges state sovereignty and justifies social policy devolution by advancing frames of intergovernmental conflict, state-level policy pragmatism, and federal ineffectiveness.

The RFF Regulatory Performance Initiative: What Have We Learned?

Retrospective analysis of federal environmental regulation aims to rigorously document the extent to which key policy objectives have been attained and at what cost. This paper reports the results of nine new case studies involving a total of 34 cost or benefit/effectiveness comparisons from a highly diverse set of environmentally oriented rules. Despite limitations of the case study approach and the non-representative nature of the sample, the results suggest somewhat of a tendency to overestimate both costs and benefits/effectiveness of regulation. Recommendations for revisions to future policy and analysis include: estimation of cost savings and distributional impacts from emissions trading, approaches to new technology development, use of up-to-date baseline information, analysis of prescriptive congressional mandates, federally mandated programs implemented by states, heterogeneity of costs and benefits, and treatment of uncertainty in energy prices and other macro factors. Recommendations also consider enhancements to the federal role in future retrospective analyses.

Feasible Pharmacare in the Federation: A Proposal to Break the Gridlock

An expanded federal role in financing pharmacare would set the stage for wider coverage and greater cooperation in drug pricing, states a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Feasible Pharmacare in the Federation: A Proposal to Break the Gridlock,” authors Ake Blomqvist and Colin Busby propose a politically affordable way forward to start addressing the runaway drug prices paid by Canadians.

Testing doesn’t measure up for Americans

The 47th annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools included questions regarding testing, the Common Core, the federal role in K12 education, vaccinations, choice, charters, & vouchers. In addition, Americans were asked name the biggest problem facing local schools and to grade schools attended by their oldest child, local schools, and schools nationally. The 2015 poll included both a telephone poll of 1,001 Americans, which provided trending responses for a handful of questions plus a web poll of 3,499 Americans for all questions. The larger web poll also allowed PDK to report for the first time about responses from three racial/ethnic groups: blacks, Hispanics, and whites. Poll results were published in several installments. The first installment was published in the September 2015 issue of Kappan magazine.

House Health Subcommittee Opens Discussion on Mental Health Bill

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Government NewsFull AccessHouse Health Subcommittee Opens Discussion on Mental Health BillAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Jul 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2015.7b9AbstractComprehensive legislation would establish the position of assistant secretary for mental health and substance use disorders within HHS and expand the mental health workforce.The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health in June reviewed legislation to fundamentally reform the federal role in the U.S. mental health system.Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) is working with fellow members of Congress to shepherd the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act through the legislative process. Murphy and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) are cosponsors of the bill.Aaron LevinThe bill, HR 2646 (Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act), is cosponsored by U.S. Reps. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and builds on previous legislation put forward by both representatives.“Severe mental illness is a brain disorder, and it has to be seen and treated for what it is,” said Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), subcommittee chair. “This bill is comprehensive and is a big first step and makes substantial changes.”At its core, the bill creates the position of assistant secretary for mental health and substance use disorders, who must be a psychiatrist or Ph.D. clinical psychologist, within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The post would elevate the importance of mental health within the agency, coordinate mental health and related programs across other federal agencies, promote effective evidence-based programs, and ensure compliance with the mental health parity law. The office would also incorporate “all personnel, assets, and obligations” of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).The new assistant secretary would have additional powers to develop a national strategy focusing on expanding the clinical psychiatric workforce, further developing integrated care and crisis intervention, and supporting mental health research.During the hearing, the subcommittee heard from several witnesses, including Paul Gionfriddo, president and CEO of Mental Health America, who called for increased mental health screening and greater emphasis on early interventions to lessen the burden on clinical services in the later course of mental illness.“Mental health care involves disease management, not handing out a pill,” added former APA President Jeffrey Lieberman, M.D., the Lawrence C. Kolb Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute.“The tools for care are available, but we have to develop the policies to implement them,” said Lieberman, speaking in favor of the bill. “We need a big-picture approach.”In a June 8 letter to Reps. Murphy and Johnson, APA President Renée Binder, M.D., and CEO and Medical Director Saul Levin, M.D., M.P.A., also expressed their support of the bill, saying, “This bipartisan legislation is a much-needed remedy for our nation’s broken mental health system.” Much of the hearing’s discussion hovered around the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and whether that law prevents clinicians from giving families information about the diagnosis, treatment, or even appointment scheduling of relatives with mental illnesses. HR 2646 would allow disclosure in some circumstances of health information covered by the privacy rule to families or caregivers when it is in the best interests of a patient who lacks decisional capacity.“We need to promote a broader conversation about individuals with mental illness, including their families and caregivers, and build a relationship to support an individual,” noted Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.).Both Republicans and Democrats on the subcommittee expressed general support for the bill and a readiness to work with the sponsors toward a final version.Murphy welcomed the wide-ranging discussion and noted that further collaboration on the bill would maintain a focus on the needs of patients. “We’ll keep working together,” he concluded.“The committee will act on this legislation, I’m sure,” Pitts said. ■A summary of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015 (HR 2646) can be accessed here. ISSUES NewArchived

Mike O'Connor. A Commercial Republic: America's Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism.

Mike O'Connor's A Commercial Republic: America's Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism is an ambitious work of intellectual history. O'Connor begins with a straightforward question that has been in the forefront of popular debate in the years since the 2008 economic collapse: What has been—and what should be—the federal government's role in shaping and reshaping the national economy? It should be none, say many, insisting that recent government economic intervention is an aberration, harmful to economic growth. It should be more, answer others, arguing that only through federal regulation and involvement can the democratic promise of both liberty and equality be maintained. These contradictory answers, O'Connor tells us, share space in the ongoing fierce debate, reaching back to the early republic, over the possibility of ensuring both democratic government and boisterous capitalism. Tracing that debate is the project of this book. To do so, O'Connor begins in the early republic and charges chronologically through the Jacksonian era, the postbellum period, the Progressive Era and New Deal, the postwar years, and ends in the Reagan/Bush years. O'Connor takes what he calls a case-study approach, picking one particular issue or idea from each period to help him dissect contemporary worries over the relationship between capitalism and democracy. The ideological pendulum swings from chapter to chapter (and within chapters as well), from favoring government intervention to staunchly opposing it. Only the swing itself remains constant. Individual chapters look at (in order) debates over the ideal of economic stewardship in the 1790s, the question of separating government and economy in the 1830s, expanded property rights in the age of incorporation in the 1870s, the plausibility of full employment in the 1930s, the amelioration of inequality in the postwar period, and the hazards of taxation in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Distribution of the Burden of US Health Care Financing

The complex financing system that supports health care spending in the US makes estimation of the incidence of financing both daunting and important. A significant portion of financing is embedded in the tax system at all levels of government, while tax expenditures that subsidize private purchases implicitly transfer a large share of financing from private to public revenue sources. We compute and describe the final incidence of financing health care by major component and in total. We use the Kakwani measure of progressivity and find the overall incidence of US health care financing to be regressive although less so than in earlier years. This change is due in part to an increased federal role. We provide detail as to our methods and assumptions for benchmarking and assessment of the equity implications of financing health care in the future.

What Teachers Should Know About Common Core

AbstractIn 2010, more than 40 states adopted the Common Core State Standards. Initially, the standards were quickly and easily embraced, but over the past year the standards have become enmeshed in various controversies, raising many questions about how the standards were written and what they include. This article attempts to provide authoritative answers to those questions. It explains the federal role in the standards writing and adoption, the sources of the standards, and the rationale for developing them. It also explores instructional issues dealing with the role of literature, phonics instruction, text complexity, and student motivation.

Does financing universal elementary education reduce interstate disparity?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine resource allocation under the centrally sponsored scheme Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and its impact on development of elementary education in India. First, the author describes the current educational disparity across states in terms of state funding. Second, the author shows that interstate disparities in education resources have more to do with capacity of states to finance elementary education. For this, the author examines funding mechanism under SSA, focusing on principles of adequacy and absorptive rates. Third, the author analyzes the impact of additional funding on the progress of elementary education across states. Fourth, the author demonstrates how funding under SSA reinforces rather than reduces interstate disparity in school funding. Finally, the author concludes with certain policy implications for reforming federal transfers in Right to Education (RTE)-SSA, which can easily be extended to Rashtria Madhya Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) to be more responsive to educational inadequacy, effort and capacity across states. Design/methodology/approach – The author uses box plots for illustrating interstate disparity across various indicators on financing and growth of elementary education. Box plots are good at portraying extreme values and illustrate differences between distributions. Because the thrust of the paper is examining difference in distribution across and within states, box plots appropriately portray the distribution of both. Further, coefficient of variation is estimated in education funding and its impact variables. Findings – Interstate disparity in additional to the funding of SSA through discretionary transfers is examined by looking at two principles of inter-governmental transfers, viz., adequacy and absorptive rates. In a way, it appears that the educationally backward states getting the highest shares and also as per the requirement of the child population, but not necessarily so in terms of their relative proportions of enrolment, schools and teachers. Yet another revelation is that actual absorptive rates are much less than apparent absorptive rates. Unambiguously, additional resources coming from the Center for Development of Education can have a positive influence only after states have achieved a certain threshold level of absorptive capacities. As evidenced, fiscal disability is not compensated by transfers via SSA, as matching shares are uniform across states. Research limitations/implications – One significant limitations of the study is its use of administrative data. Often, administrative data from developing countries especially on social sector like education report inflated figures. The study uses primarily such but published secondary data sources. Practical implications – Finally, the author suggests certain policy implications for reforming federal role in the current RTE-SSA, which can easily be extended to RMSA, a CSS in secondary education, to be more responsive to state effort and capacity. Social implications – Though SSA attempts to address regional imbalance, the accumulated initial advantage of better-off states with uniform norms under SSA funding widens the interstate disparity rather than reduce it. It is, hence, mandated to look at building capacities and enable states for a level-playing field. Originality/value – It adds value to existing studies in two ways: rarely studies examine SSA expenditures and its impact on development and financing of elementary education, and examine a question on horizontal equalization mechanism whether additional allocation under SSA induce or reduce interstate disparity.

ESEA at 50

The author draws on his extensive experience helping lead Congress’s education efforts and later a highly respected education research concern to propose a new approach to federal education policy that expands and transforms the federal role. This new approach would significantly expand federal aid to schools that is not restricted to particular categories of students but that is contingent on states’ willingness to address the most fundamental issues that impede educational progress. This expanded general aid program could be called the United for Students Act (USA). A new approach is needed because progress has not been sufficient and because the world is changing at such a fast pace that we cannot procrastinate, the author says. If we want improvement, we must let go of resistance to change and sweep aside old excuses to adopting new and better ways.

A Tale of Two Cases: Shifting Sands of Federal and State Jurisdiction over Electricity

In a recent decision revisiting the separate spheres of state and federal jurisdiction over electricity, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit adopted a narrow statutory interpretation of federal authority that ignores the broad view of the wholesale electricity market as a single enterprise cutting across state boundaries. If correct, what effect will precluding a federal role in demand response have on the wholesale electricity markets and the prices consumers pay? Further, can the apparently shifting sands of federal and state jurisdiction over electricity be reconciled, or has the D.C. Circuit identified another regulatory gap that may only be resolved by the intervention of Congress?

Reopening the Case for a Balanced Budget Amendment

Congress has expressed interest, one way or the other, in a balanced-budget requirement for the past six decades. Yet despite numerous attempts, the legislative body has never passed a constitutional balanced-budget amendment. Most of the analysis of why we don’t yet have a constitutional amendment has been focused on the legal and political aspects of the issue. Less time and effort has been spent on economic analysis. This paper discusses how a balanced-budget requirement would change federal fiscal policy and thereby to some degree the federal government's role in the economy. The paper proposes an evaluation method for the impact that balanced-budget requirements have on the economy.

Health System Leadership and the Federal Role in Canada.

While provincial governments constitute the primary locus for healthcare system decision-making and provision, the federal government retains an important funding and "steering" role in directing health system performance. This commentary explores three possible redeployments of the federal spending power to elevate health system performance; improve access; increase individual, provincial and regional equity; and achieve better health outcomes for present and future Canadians. The proposals include amending the Canada Health Transfer to better support its original policy purpose, improving and expanding an informational and analytical infrastructure and the eventual implementation of single pharmacare program by the Government of Canada. These changes are aimed at accelerating evidence-based health reforms to improve access, quality and responsiveness of healthcare and, ultimately, health outcomes.

The Evolution of the Federal Role in Supporting Community Recovery After U.S. Disasters

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The process of long-term recovery, if done well, can minimize post-disaster disruption, address problems that existed before the disaster struck, and improve the future resilience of a community. The U.S. government, however, historically has lacked a systematic approach to supporting community recovery. This study describes the history of federal policies for supporting community recovery after disasters, with particular attention to the roles of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). We conclude by considering the new National Disaster Recovery Framework (NDRF). This historical review suggests that the federal government needs to emphasize the following: providing resources for community recovery planning; facilitating increased flows of information after disasters; streamlining FEMA assistance to public agencies; explicitly working to reduce the barriers between FEMA and HUD; and incorporating equity into recovery policies. Recovery policies also need to include incentives to achieve substantive goals of rebuilding in a way that is sustainable, equitable, cost-effective, and timely, and that reduces the chances of future disasters.Takeaway for practice: Local community planners can draw several lessons from this historical account. First, they should become aware of the various post-disaster programs now, before disaster strikes. Second, knowledge of post-disaster policies and programs will enable planners to use them creatively and effectively if disaster strikes. Third, in the midst of reconstruction, planners need to continually seek opportunities to promote betterment and resilience to natural hazards.

Organized labor and the origins of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

New Solutions is republishing this 1991 article by Robert Asher, which reviews the history of organized labor's efforts in the United States to secure health and safety protections for workers. The 1877 passage of the Massachusetts factory inspection law and the implementation of primitive industrial safety inspection systems in many states paralleled labor action for improved measures to protect workers' health and safety. In the early 1900s labor was focusing on workers' compensation laws. The New Deal expanded the federal government's role in worker protection, supported at least by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but challenged by industry and many members of the U.S. Congress. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO backed opposing legal and inspection strategies in the late 1940s and through the 1950s. Still, by the late 1960s, several unions were able to help craft the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and secure new federal protections for U.S. workers.