It all started with a fire drill.
This past December, approximately 13 firefighter crews arrived at a Las Vegas tunnel dug by Boring Company, Elon Musk’s $5.6 billion underground transportation startup. After two hours practicing the rescue of a 200-pound mannequin dummy, two of the firefighters ended up in the hospital with chemical burns from the “muck” liquid that pools in the base of the tunnels—a mixture of chemicals, groundwater, and earth. Nevada’s workplace safety regulator launched an investigation and issued three “willful” citations against Boring Co.—the most aggressive violations the state OSHA can levy.
That’s when Steve Davis, the president of Boring, who was just wrapping up a stint helping Musk run the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), picked up the phone. He called Chris Reilly, a former Tesla leader who in 2024 had joined Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo’s office.
Within 24 hours of that call, a coterie of high-level Nevada officials had gathered to meet with Davis and other executives at the Boring Company, and the citations had been rescinded.
State regulators maintain that the outreach from the Governor’s Office led Nevada OSHA to go back and review the citations and determine they were invalid and should never have been issued in the first place. “We decided that the best course of action was to withdraw the citation pending further review,” one of the regulators in the meeting told Fortune.
But a Fortune investigation found that citations being rescinded in such a manner—outside of Nevada OSHA’s standard process and with this level of political involvement—is highly unusual and goes against procedure.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.
After the citations were revoked, OSHA didn’t update the case file to explain their removal, and, what’s more, evidence of the meeting—a line item on OSHA’s case file noting that a meeting had been held with Boring and the Governor’s office—was even deleted. There were other irregularities, too: Documents weren’t saved to the file, and a document intended to provide reasoning for revoking the citations was left out.
All of this has caused a chilling effect within Nevada OSHA, our investigation found, particularly because two OSHA staffers who worked on the case were demoted or written up. And it raises questions about the degree to which a powerful business—one owned by the world’s richest person and a major figure in Nevada’s economy—is able to bend regulatory guardrails to its will and skirt proper oversight.
In statements to Fortune, Nevada OSHA says it has amended its case file after Fortune’s outreach “to ensure that the file is accurate.” OSHA also said it has updated its policies and procedures to provide more oversight of OSHA investigations into “high-profile” employers.
You can read our entire investigation here, and we hope you will.
A note from me… It’s me, Jessica Mathews, who used to write this newsletter. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of journalism in a world of generative AI, Substacks, blogs, and “new media.” While there’s a lot of noise, there’s also a lot of really great content, and I find all the new ways of telling stories to be exciting and valuable. But I do also want to stress that hard-hitting investigations cannot be published without the resources of a newsroom and a team of people willing to stand behind reporters when they go to print. Accountability, verification, and on-the-ground reporting cost money, and it’s not easy work. So thank you for reading it, sharing it, and supporting it so we can do more of it. Here is a gift link to share the story.
Until next time,
Jessica Mathews
X: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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