The first thing—and maybe the most important thing—you learn when you participate in a Washington fly-in event is that most of the contact that U.S. industry has with the Houses of Congress is not with Senators and Congressmen, but rather with legislative assistants and aides, many of them in their 20s, which means that none of them were even alive when the current OSHA standard on forklift safety was written, back in 1969 (to put that into context, 1969 was Richard M. Nixon's first year as President).
For some time, the Industrial Truck Association (ITA), the trade group representing forklift manufacturers as well as suppliers to the industry, has been urging OSHA to update—not replace, but simply to update—that 1969 standard to reflect the advances in technology and best practices that have occurred over the intervening 40+ years. The ITA’s position is that the most recent edition of the ANSI/ITSFD B56.1 standard, from 2012, “reflects the state of the art in forklift safety.”