View from K Street: DOL is MIA

As of this writing, some weeks have passed since the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved the Department of Labor’s (DOL) long-awaited overtime regulations. There’s just one thing: Nothing has been published, and no explanation has been given for the unprecedented silence. Is it cold feet? Fear of judicial condemnation? Lack of interest? Nobody paying attention? That’s hard to believe because the White House is acutely aware of the need to publish regulations speedily to avoid their being blocked by a new Congress and a new administration under the Congressional Review Act. The specter of the CRA was made clear recently when both Houses of Congress voted to block the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) joint employer regulations. President Joe Biden vetoed this embarrassing bipartisan affront, but the point was emphatically made.

But with today’s DOL, it’s hard to know whether most anything it does (or fails to do) is the product of intent or oversight because it is an agency that seems to be without direction or purpose. This is particularly surprising in an administration so avowedly proworker and prolabor. Labor is a huge department, charged with overseeing everything from health and safety to the minimum wage, from pensions to prevailing wages, from affirmative action to unemployment. It’s often said that after the Post Office, no other government entity touches so many Americans in a supposedly positive way. But it seems in a rut, diminished, ignored. It’s certainly a department without a Senate-confirmed secretary, and that is likely emblematic of the department as a whole and the president’s interest in the department.