On May 28, hours after Nevada’s workplace safety agency served notice of more than $400,000 in fines to Elon Musk’s $5.6 billion tunneling startup the Boring Company, the phone rang at Nevada governor Joe Lombardo’s office.
Boring Co. president Steve Davis was on the line. Boring Company was challenging citations from Nevada’s workplace safety regulator blaming it for chemical burns two firefighters had suffered in its tunnels during a training exercise.
By the next afternoon, a group of high-ranking state officials, including the governor’s state infrastructure coordinator who took the call, were convened in a room with Davis, who was himself wrapping up a stint in Washington D.C. helping Musk run the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the beginning of that meeting, the citations and fines—among the agency’s largest in a decade and a potential threat to Boring’s plans to build tunnels in other U.S. cities—were summarily rescinded.
Soon, something else disappeared: The record of the Governor’s office meeting with Musk’s company was removed from a public document without explanation. More irregularities in the case file occurred: Documents weren’t saved to the file, and a document intended to provide reasoning for revoking the citations was left out.
The sequence of events, which Fortune is the first to report, raised alarm and has had a chilling effect within Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, according to an OSHA staffer as well as someone who worked on the case, and it raises questions about the degree to which a powerful business is able to bend regulatory guardrails to its will and skirt proper oversight, especially as Musk’s consortium of companies become increasingly intertwined with Nevada’s economy.
“There is a defined process, and we didn’t follow it,” says one of the people that worked on the case file. “It wasn’t the agency that decided to do that—it was above the agency,” the person added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from speaking about internal OSHA matters.
In statements to Fortune, Teri Williams, a spokeswoman for Nevada OSHA and the state departments that sit above it, described most of the irregularities in public record documentation of the case as innocuous mistakes, and said the agency had amended its case file after Fortune’s outreach “to ensure that the file is accurate.” She said the citations and fines did not meet legal requirements and should never have been issued in the first place, and that, as a result of this incident, the agency has since updated its policies and procedures to provide more oversight of OSHA investigations into “high-profile” employers.
Regarding the meeting, Williams said that the Governor’s office “frequently receives complaints and inquiries” from employers and that “it is standard practice” for the Governor’s office to reach out to leadership to assist with complaints and inquiries. She said that the Governor’s office has never directed Nevada agencies to resolve complaints and that, in this instance, it would have supported an agency decision to keep citations if they were “found to have merit and could be validated.”
“This specific outreach from Boring Company is not an anomaly and only stands out due to the high-profile nature of the business because of its affiliation with Elon Musk,” she said. (To read Nevada’s OSHA entire response to this story, click here.)
Four lawyers and former Nevada regulators, however, say this level of political involvement in an OSHA investigation is not only highly unusual, but goes against procedure. “It’s absolutely not appropriate,” said Jess Lankford, who oversaw Nevada OSHA until 2021. The agency is supposed to have the political independence to call “balls and strikes” as it sees fit, says Terry Johnson, an adjunct professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who previously served as the director of the department that sits above OSHA.
... continue reading