When he takes office on Jan. 20, President-elect Joe Biden will inherit a raging pandemic that has claimed 254,000 American lives and counting , and his team will face the daunting task of turning around the Trump administration s disastrous federal response.

One of the first places they should look for course-correction is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration .

Under Trump, OSHA has largely left employers to police themselves when it comes to preventing coronavirus exposure at work. The agency has performed inspections for only a tiny fraction of the thousands of worker complaints that have poured in since March. It has levied relatively puny fines for violations, even in cases where workers died. And it has issued no new regulations to address the specific challenges of this pandemic.

Safety experts and former OSHA officials say the workplace policies of the Trump administration could be reversed some of them quickly and unilaterally and that doing so could help save the lives of not just workers but their families and neighbors, too.

Its important to think of this not just as worker protection. Its community protection, said Gregory Wagner, a physician and former adviser at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (and not OSHA). We hope a new approach by a new administration can make a difference.