The Trump administration wants to roll back decades-old protections for America’s youngest workers by allowing teens to toil for longer hours under some of the nation’s most hazardous workplace conditions, a new report said Tuesday.

The Department of Labor will propose relaxing current rules—known as Hazardous Occupations Orders — that bar 16- and 17-year-old apprentices and student learners from receiving extended, supervised training in certain dangerous jobs, sources told Bloomberg Law.

That includes roofing work, as well as operating chainsaws, and various other power-driven machines that federal law recognizes as too dangerous for youths younger than 18.

“The Department proposes to safely launch more family-sustaining careers by removing current regulatory restrictions on the amount of time that apprentices and student learners may perform HO-governed work,” the DOL stated in summary of its plan.

A department spokesman declined to comment to the news service.

Currently, 16- to 17-year-old apprentices and high school students in vocational programs can receive limited exemptions to perform work in some of the hazardous occupations, but those exemptions generally don’t exceed an hour a day.

But the effort will receive sharp criticism among child labor advocates and former government officials, who say the rule would erase decades of progress in reducing youth occupational fatalities and injuries.

The administration plans to frame this as a rule to facilitate closely supervised training that actually enhances safety by allowing youth more practice on the machinery they can operate full time at 18.

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta’s ability to navigate the politically fraught terrain of easing child labor protections may be smoothed with the support of at least one Senate Democrat.

This issue has hardly been at the top of the business community’s DOL regulatory wish list. But that doesn’t mean employers wouldn’t like to see the department update the rules to reflect modern advances that they say make the equipment safer for minors,

A former Labor senior official who spent 20 years enforcing child labor law didn’t mince words when learning of the agency’s rulemaking intentions.

“When you find 16-year-olds running a meat slicer or a mini grinder or a trash compactor, we know kids are severely injured in those circumstances,” Michael Hancock, who left the department in 2015 to represent workers, told the website.

“That’s why the laws exist in the first place. Now we’re saying, ‘We’re going to open those hazards up to kids; we hope that the employer is going to follow the law to a T and make sure the kid is being closely supervised.’”