Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, authored an article in PLI Current: The Journal of PLI Press, Vol. 9 (2025), titled “What to Expect from the Wage and Hour Division in the Second Trump Administration.”
Following is an excerpt (see below to download the full version in PDF format):
Each time a new administration arrives in Washington, D.C., stakeholders wait with bated breath to find out what, if anything, will be different in the federal agencies, including the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the U.S. Department of Labor (the Department). This is especially so when the party in power changes. Now that we know the outcome of the 2024 federal elections, we can begin to prepare for likely shifts in regulatory priorities, enforcement practices, and overall approaches to achieving compliance. And because President-elect Trump previously served a term in office, a great deal of information is already available regarding how WHD is likely to function over the next four years.
I. Key Appointments
As we saw in the first Trump administration, the identity of the key appointments, most notably the secretary of labor, but also such figures as the deputy secretary, the solicitor of labor, and the administrator of WHD, can have an enormous impact on how the agencies function. In 2017, WHD got off to a fairly slow start due, at least in part, to a failed secretary nomination, followed by the confirmation of Secretary Alexander Acosta, whose approach to policy change was slow and cautious. Starting in July of 2019, however, when Patrick Pizzella became acting secretary, the pace of policy innovation increased rapidly. And once Eugene Scalia became secretary at the end of September 2019, the Department’s rulemaking activities shifted into high gear and maintained that pace through the end of the term.
Thus, one of the first things to watch for is whom the president-elect selects for leadership roles at the Department, and especially the secretary and the WHD administrators. Informed by his experience during his first term in office and keenly aware that he has just four years to effect the key changes he wants to make—and that the time will fly by much faster than incoming administrations typically anticipate—President-elect Trump is likely to put in place a leadership team at the Department with a bias toward decisive action. In this respect, it seems likely that the Department will function more like it did during the second half of the president-elect’s first term, rather than the first half.
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