As the shutdown grinds on exactly the way its architects planned it—if you were this particular president*, wouldn't you derive some comfort from knowing that FBI agents aren't getting paid?—it's important to remember that crippling the federal government on behalf of your political landlords has been a conservative goal since Ronald Reagan took office. This administration* threw that into hyperdrive, and it has now put a government shutdown on top of it. The shutdown intensifies the deregulatory hobbling of health and safety laws that this country's oligarchs want to see permanently crippled.

And, as Reuters reports, that's bad news for people who already were suffering from the effects of industry-friendly government. People like Wardell Davis, for example.

Then 24 years old, with no high school diploma, Davis had for years bounced between part-time jobs. The contractor, he says, promised better pay for grueling labor: blasting the hulls of U.S. Navy ships with coarsely ground coal particles to remove rust and paint. He recalls the fog of dust created as workers fired the crushed coal – a residue from coal-fired power plants – against the ship bottoms from high-powered hoses, moving through the tented blasting area in respirators and protective suits...

In 2014, doctors at Norfolk’s Sentara Hospital found a “black foreign material” in his lungs. Davis successfully filed a disability claim for “pneumoconiosis/silicosis and/or interstitial fibrotic disease caused by exposure to abrasive blasting dust.” Four years and three biopsies later, Davis survives on a single lung.

As the story explains, Davis's illness was caused by exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen that is used in the kind of work Davis did in the shipyard—essentially, sand-blasting the rust off the hulls of naval vessels.

A worker cleans a ship at a Naval shipyard. Steve Helber/AP/REX/Shutterstock

As the Obama Administration was leaving office, it enacted a rule that required increased monitoring of workers using beryllium, as well as limiting their exposure to the poison. Then, the electoral college gifted the republic with Camp Runamuck, and you don't need to be Tony Romo to see where this was heading.

The Trump administration has left the new beryllium exposure limits intact. But in June 2017, it announced plans to exempt shipbuilding and construction operations from the rule’s “ancillary provisions,” which require air quality testing, new workplace hygiene measures and employee health monitoring for beryllium-related illnesses. That decision, scheduled to take effect in June 2019, would remove the estimated 11,500 workers from the protections, a government analysis shows.

And endangering these workers for a buck came pretty cheap.

The Trump administration’s plan to weaken the beryllium rule offers a case study in the renewed power businesses can wield in the regulatory process. In this case, emails and government documents reviewed by Reuters show, a small industry – the manufacturers of coal-based abrasive blasting grit – used a modest $270,000 lobbying campaign and well-placed congressional allies to unwind a rule a decade in the making. “Never in OSHA’s history has the agency decided to roll back worker protections for a carcinogen,” Deborah Berkowitz, OSHA’s former chief of staff, wrote the agency on behalf of the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit workers rights group.

The rest of the story is a sad tale of what Draining The Swamp really turned out to mean—to wit, draining cash into the right pockets like water through a mill wheel.

Hours after OSHA announced the beryllium rule delay on March 21, 2017, Byrne sent another letter to the agency. This one was organized with Virginia Republican Rep. Robert Wittman, then-chairman of a House subcommittee overseeing Naval programs and infrastructure, and co-signed by 14 other congressional Republicans from the House and Senate. The letter thanked OSHA for the delay but urged it to issue a new beryllium rule that did not include the ancillary safety provisions for the shipyard and construction industries.

Rep. Robert Wittman Bill Clark Getty Images

That same day, Byrne’s re-election campaign received $5,000 in contributions from the Associated Builders & Contractors, an industry group that supports scrapping the ancillary provisions. Byrne, Wittman and others who signed the letter have drawn financial support for years from the contractors and other industry groups with a stake in the rule, including the Shipbuilders Council of America, which donated $5,000 to each lawmaker in the 2017-18 election cycle.

Morrow said the two groups had made other donations to Byrne, and that there was no correlation between the donations and beryllium rule. Asked about the donations, Shipbuilders Council of America President Matthew Paxton said worker safety is “the top priority of our industry” and that the council is part of a safety alliance with OSHA. The Associated Builders & Contractors did not respond to interview requests.

And Wardell Davis goes through life with one lung in a country that no longer has a heart.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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