Regulation

Federal Watchdog Agencies Still On Guard

Donald Trump likes to give the impression that he has made great strides in dismantling regulation. While there is no doubt that his administration and Republican allies in Congress are targeting many important safeguards for consumers and workers, the good news is that those protections in many respects are still alive and well.

This conclusion emerges from the data I have been collecting for an update of Violation Tracker that will be posted later this month. As a preview of that update, here are some examples of federal agencies that are still vigorously pursuing their mission of protecting the public.

Federal Trade Commission. In June the FTC, with the help of the Justice Department, prevailed in litigation against Dish Network over millions of illegal sales calls made to consumers in violation of Do Not Call regulations. The satellite TV provider was hit with $280 million in penalties.

Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA is a regulatory entity as well as a law enforcement agency. In July it announced that Mallinckrodt, one of the largest manufacturers of generic oxycodone, had agreed to pay $35 million to settle allegations that it violated the Controlled Substances Act by failing to detect and report suspicious bulk orders of the drug.

Federal Reserve. The Fed continues to take action against both domestic and foreign banks that fail to exercise adequate controls over their foreign exchange trading, in the wake of a series of scandals about manipulation of that market. The Fed imposed a fine of $136 million on Germany’s Deutsche Bank and $246 million on France’s BNP Paribas.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last month the beleaguered CFPB ordered American Express to pay $95 million in redress to cardholders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for discriminatory practices against certain consumers with Spanish-language preferences.

Securities and Exchange Commission. In May the SEC announced that Barclays Capital would pay $97 million in reimbursements to customers who had been overcharged on mutual fund fees.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC announced that the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain would pay $12 million to settle allegations that it discriminated against older employees by denying them front-of-the-house positions such as hosts, servers and bartenders.

Justice Department Antitrust Division. The DOJ announced that Nichicon Corporation would pay $42 million to resolve criminal price-fixing charges involving electrolytic capacitors.

Federal agencies are also finishing up cases dating back to the financial meltdown. For example, in July the Federal Housing Finance Agency said that it had reached a settlement under which the Royal Bank of Scotland will pay $5.5 billion to settle litigation relating to the sale of toxic securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the National Credit Union Administration said that UBS would pay $445 million to resolve a similar case.

It remains to be seen whether federal watchdogs can continue to pursue these kinds of cases, but for now they are not letting talk of deregulation prevent them from doing their job.

Note: The new version of Violation Tracker will also include an additional ten years of coverage back to 2000.

Capital Punishment or Capital Reward?

When Betsy DeVos was nominated to head the Department of Education, the main concern was what harm a “choice” crusader would bring to K-12 public schools. Recently we’ve seen that she can also cause damage with regard to post-secondary education.

DeVos announced plans to delay the implementation of rules on for-profit colleges that the Obama Administration fought long and hard to bring into being. Calling the plan unfair, DeVos said she wants to redo the rulemaking process from scratch – a clear sign that she wants to weaken or eliminate the restrictions. That’s the premise of a lawsuit just filed against DeVos by the attorneys general of 18 states and the District of Columbia.

The Obama campaign against predatory colleges was one of the most consequential initiatives of the administration on corporate misconduct. In addition to the rules – one of which is designed to bar federal loans at schools whose graduates don’t earn enough to pay off their debt and another that would make it easier to erase debt incurred at bogus institutions – the Obama Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brought enforcement actions that helped bring about the demise of flagrant abusers such as Corinthian Colleges and ITT Educational Services.

And this came after the Obama Administration pushed Congress to get commercial banks out of the student loan business.

Taken together, the Obama era measures against predatory for-profit education represent one of the rare instances in which government action targeted not just an illegitimate practice or a miscreant company but an entire industry. The message was not simply that for-profit colleges needed to be reformed but rather that they should not continue to exist. It was capital punishment for capital.

It comes as no surprise that the billionaire DeVos, who has had personal involvement with dubious business ventures, is seeking to undo the crackdown on for-profit colleges. And it is yet another example of how the Trump Administration is working against the interests of those lower-income voters who put him in office.

The same dynamic can be seen in the healthcare arena. The Republican “solution” to the problems of the Affordable Care Act is to make it easier for insurance companies to offer bare-bones junk insurance while dismantling Medicaid, both in its traditional form and its expansion under the ACA. The latest version of the Senate bill is willing to retain the hated taxes on high-income earners as long as the assault on the socialistic Medicaid program moves forward.

It appears that the right’s desire to protect the interests of corporations – including the most predatory – is even greater than its wish to redistribute income upward. Thus the one thing that Republicans have made sure to do with their stranglehold on the federal government has been to roll back as many business regulations as possible.

It remains to be seen how long Trump and Congressional Republicans can get away with telling their working class supporters that predatory corporations are the ones that deserve relief.

The Insurance Industry’s No-Lose Situation

Many voices are speaking out about the Republican effort to undo the Affordable Care Act, but one party diligently refrains from public comment: the insurance industry. While the industry is undoubtedly exerting its influence in the closed-door negotiations to restructure the wildly unpopular GOP bill, it is not airing those views more widely.

It doesn’t have to, because the healthcare debate between the two major parties is largely a disagreement on how best to serve the needs of Aetna, Anthem and the other big players.

The ACA, of course, was built on the premise that government should expand coverage largely by providing subsidies to help the uninsured purchase plans from private companies. When those companies became dissatisfied with the composition of their new client base and starting jacking up premiums in response, ACA supporters were put in the position of advocating for new insurer financial incentives.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are seeking to help the industry by rolling back Medicaid expansion and allowing it to return to the pre-Obamacare practice of selling bare-bones junk insurance, which would be the only kind that many people could afford after subsidies are decimated.

This is probably a no-lose situation for the insurers: either they get paid more to provide decent coverage or they are freed to sell highly profitable lousy plans.

All those legislators catering to insurers one way or the other are forgetting that healthcare reform was made necessary by the ruthless behavior of that same industry. If those companies had not been denying coverage whenever possible, it would not have been necessary for the ACA to set minimum standards. And if those firms had not been raising premiums relentlessly, it would not have been necessary for the ACA to take steps — which turned out to be inadequate — to try to restrain costs.

The industry’s unethical practices are not limited to the individual marketplace. The big insurers have also exploited the decision by policymakers to give them a foothold in the big federally funded programs: Medicaid and Medicare.

As Senate Republicans were cooking up their repeal and replace bill, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles joined two cases against one of the industry’s giants, UnitedHealth Group. The whistleblower suits accuse the company of systematically overcharging the federal government for services provided under the Medicare Advantage Program.

The complaints in the cases allege that UnitedHealth routinely scoured millions of medical records, searching for data it could use to make patients seem sicker than they actually were and thus justify bigger payments for the company, which was also accused of failing to correct invalid diagnoses made by providers. Either way, the complaints argue, UnitedHealth was bilking Medicare Advantage, which was created on the assumption that bringing the private sector into a government program would cut costs.

Such assumptions continue to afflict federal health policy as a whole. Too many members of Congress continue to worship the market in the face of all the evidence that the private insurance industry cannot be the foundation of a humane healthcare system.

Exporting Hazards or Globalizing Regulation?

Americans may have initially felt a bit smug upon learning that the combustible material responsible for the Grenfell Tower disaster in London is largely banned in the United States. Perhaps our regulatory system is not as deficient as we thought.

That moral superiority went out the window when it came to light that the deadly cladding was purchased from an American-based company. Some of the outrage being exhibited toward public officials in Britain should also be aimed at Arconic, a company created from the break-up of the aluminum giant Alcoa. Arconic has announced that it will suspend sales of the cladding, known as Reynobond PE, for high-rises, but that does little good for the scores of people killed in the Grenfell fire or the thousands of others who have been forced to leave other apartment houses now found to contain the material.

Although most of the attention is on Arconic’s cladding and its role in spreading the conflagration, it turns out that fire itself was caused by another American product, a refrigerator made by Whirlpool under its Hotpoint brand. The appliance had a back made out of flammable plastic rather than the metal typically used in models sold in the United States. The London Fire Brigade had long lobbied, to no avail, to require new appliances to have fire-resistant backing.

The sale of banned products in offshore markets is, unfortunately, a longstanding practice among U.S-based multinational corporations. What’s unusual in this case is that the offshore market is a wealthy country such as Britain, whereas the dumping is normally done in poor countries.

As Russell Mokhiber points out in his 1988 book Corporate Crime and Violence, one of the earliest examples was that of the now defunct company A.H. Robins, which in the 1970s sold thousands of its Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive devices in 42 countries even after it became apparent that thousands of U.S. women were experiencing severe and sometimes deadly ailments linked to the IUDs.

In 1972 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency prohibited most uses of the insecticide DDT, yet American producers continued to sell in foreign markets for years until most other countries adopted their own bans.

U.S. companies also continued to export dangerous products such as asbestos, flammable children’s pajamas and lead-based house paint after being barred from selling them in domestic markets.

These practices illustrate the perverse way that most large companies regard the regulation of their business. They are not willing to admit that restrictions are legitimate — even when imposed in the wake or injuries and deaths — and will adhere to them only to the extent absolutely necessary. If they can continue to sell products they have been told are harmful to some customers, they will do so.

This mindset seems to result from both a knee-jerk ideological opposition to all regulation and an amoral pursuit of profits. The persistence of corporate crime suggests that attempting to reform big business from within — the dubious promise of corporate social responsibility — is far from adequate. Just as markets have superseded borders, so must regulation be globalized.

The Other Trump Collusion Scandal

For months the news has been filled with reports of suspicious meetings between Trump associates and Russian officials. Another category of meetings also deserves closer scrutiny: the encounters between Trump himself and top executives of scores of major corporations since Election Day. What do these companies want from the new administration?

During the presidential campaign, Trump often hinted that he would be tough on corporate misconduct — especially the offshoring of jobs — and this won him a significant number of votes. After taking office, however, much of the economic populism has disappeared in favor of a shamelessly pro-corporate approach, especially when it comes to regulation. Big business has put aside whatever misgivings it had about Trump and now seeks favors from him.

There is always a fine line between deregulation and the encouragement of corporate crime and misconduct. We should be concerned about the latter, given the roster of executives who have made pilgrimages to the White House.

Public Citizen has just published a report looking at the track record of the roughly 120 companies whose executives have met publicly with Trump since November 8 and finds that many of them “are far from upstanding corporate citizens.”

Using data from Violation Tracker (which I and my colleagues produce at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First), Public Citizen finds that more than 100 of the visitors were from companies that appear in the database as having paid a federal fine or settlement since the beginning of 2010.

In its tally of these penalties, which includes those associated with companies such as Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil whose executives were brought right into the administration, Public Citizen finds that the total is about $90 billion.

At the top of the list are companies from the two sectors that have been at the forefront of the corporate crime wave of recent years: banks and automakers. JPMorgan Chase, with penalties of almost $29 billion, is in first place. Also in the top dozen are Citigroup ($15 billion), Goldman Sachs ($9 billion), HSBC ($4 billion) and BNY Mellon ($741 million). Volkswagen, still embroiled in the emissions cheating scandal, has the second highest penalty total ($19 billion). Two other automakers make the dirty dozen: Toyota ($1.3 billion) and General Motors ($936 million).

The rest of the dirty dozen are companies from another notorious industry: pharmaceuticals. These include Johnson & Johnson ($2.5 billion), Merck ($957 million), Novartis ($938 million) and Amgen ($786 million).

All these companies have a lot to gain from a relaxation of federal oversight of their operations. While it remains unclear whether the Trump campaign used its meetings with Russian officials to plan election collusion, there is no doubt that the administration has been using its meetings with corporate executives to plan regulatory rollbacks that will have disastrous financial, safety and health consequences.

Another Form of Denial

Lurking behind the assault on regulation being carried out by the Trump Administration and its Congressional allies is the assumption that corporations, freed from bureaucratic meddling, will tend to do the right thing. That assumption is belied by a mountain of evidence that companies, if allowed to pursue profit without restraint, will act in ways that harm workers, consumers and communities. In fact, they will do so even when those restraints are theoretically in effect.

The latest indication of the true proclivities of big business comes in a report just released by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board on a 2015 explosion at the Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, California. That accident spewed toxic debris and kept the facility at limited capacity for a year, boosting gasoline prices in the region and costing drivers in the state an estimated $2.4 billion.

According to the safety board, the accident was not an act of god but rather the result of substandard practices on the part of Exxon. The report states:

The CSB found that this incident occurred due to weaknesses in the ExxonMobil Torrance refinery’s process safety management system. These weaknesses led to operation of the FCC [fluid catalytic cracking] unit without pre-established safe operating limits and criteria for unit shutdown, reliance on safeguards that could not be verified, the degradation of a safety-critical safeguard, and the re-use of a previous procedure deviation without a sufficient hazard analysis that confirmed that the assumed process conditions were still valid.

Exxon was also found to have used critical equipment beyond its expected safe operating life. The CSB investigation also discovered that a large piece of debris from the explosion narrowly missed hitting a tank containing tens of thousands of pounds of highly toxic modified hydrofluoric acid. Exxon refused to respond to the agency’s request for information detailing the safeguards it had (or did not have) in place to prevent or mitigate a release of the acid. The agency has gone to court to try to get the information.

The CSB is an investigatory and not a regulatory body, so it does not have the power to penalize Exxon for its role in bringing about what the agency called a “preventable” incident. Yet its report adds another entry to Exxon’s dismal corporate rap sheet. The Torrance refinery itself, which came from the Mobil side of the family, has a long history of fires, explosions and leaks. The rest of Exxon has a track record that includes the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, numerous pipeline accidents and much more, including many years of climate denial. This tainted record did not prevent the company’s CEO from being the U.S. Secretary of State.

Last year, the Torrance refinery was sold by Exxon to PBF Energy, which has subsequently experienced “multiple incidents,” as the CSB diplomatically put it.

No matter how many instances of corporate negligence are brought to light, there are always business apologists ready to point the finger at regulators instead. The gospel of deregulation is now the state religion of the Trump Administration. How many preventable disasters will it take to share that belief?

Grand Theft Wage

Several weeks ago, in one of his few legislative successes, President Trump signed a bill rescinding the Obama Administration’s executive order on Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces. The order, designed to promote better employment practices by companies doing business with the federal government, instructed procurement officials to consider the labor track record of contractors, which were required to disclose their recent violations.

Business groups, which had attacked the order as a form of blacklisting, have gotten their way, but it is still possible for a federal procurement officer to determine whether a bidder is a rogue employer. It’s simply a matter of plugging the company’s name into Violation Tracker, the free database on corporate crime and misconduct I have assembled with my colleagues at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.

We’ve just announced the latest expansion of the database: 34,000 Fair Labor Standards Act cases brought since the beginning of 2010 by the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Labor Department. The dataset, covering cases with back pay and penalties of $5,000 or more, represents the recovery of more than $1.2 billion by WHD investigators.

Many of the offending employers are smaller businesses, but wage theft is far from unknown among large corporations. The biggest cumulative amounts collected by the WHD since 2010 came from oilfield services company Halliburton, which in 2015 agreed to an $18 million settlement of alleged overtime violations, and CoreCivic (the new name of private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America), which in 2014 agreed to an $8 million settlement. Also among the top ten are Walt Disney ($4.2 million) and Royal Dutch Shell ($2.6 million).

The wage and hour cases supplement existing Violation Tracker data in two other key areas that had been included in the executive order: workplace safety (OSHA cases) and employment discrimination (cases brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs). We are now in the process of obtaining data on the remaining category — unfair labor practice cases — from the National Labor Relations Board.

DOL administrative actions are not the only game in town when it comes to challenging wage theft, which a 2014 Economic Policy Institute report estimated could be costing U.S. workers as much as $50 billion a year. Some of the biggest recoveries come in lawsuits known as collective actions that are brought in federal court on behalf of groups of workers and often result in multi-million-dollar settlements. Unfortunately, there is no central information source on these settlements. The Corporate Research Project is in the process of piecing together the data from multiple sources and will add it to Violation Tracker later this year.

The issues covered by the Obama executive order are just a portion of what can be found in Violation Tracker. We now have 158,000 cases brought by 42 federal regulatory agencies and all divisions of the Justice Department. The fines and settlement amounts in these cases total more than $320 billion.

Violation Tracker data is now current through late March of this year, but for some agencies there was not a lot of case information to collect for the first two months of the Trump Administration. For example, the Wage and Hour Division, which in recent years usually announced numerous case resolutions each month via press releases, has posted only a handful of such releases since Inauguration Day. There’s no indication that the work of the division has stopped, but it appears that the Trump appointees now running the Labor Department are not eager to publicize enforcement activities.

The Tainted Reverse Revolving Door

Given his own string of business controversies, it perhaps should come as no surprise that Donald Trump does not seem to worry much about the accountability track record of the companies from which he has recruited key members of his administration.

It’s well known that he chose as his Secretary of State the chief executive of environmental culprit Exxon Mobil, that he brought in a slew of people from controversial investment house Goldman Sachs, that his Treasury Secretary had operated a bank notorious for foreclosures, and that his first pick for Labor Secretary had run a fast-food company with numerous wage and hour violations.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that those were not anomalies. Research being carried out in collaboration with independent investigator Don Wiener shows that the administration also has a tendency in its second-tier White House and subcabinet appointees to select people associated with companies that have a checkered reputation.

When we initially embarked on this effort we expected to have to look into hundreds of names, primarily by checking their affiliated companies in our Violation Tracker. So far, whether by design or disorganization, the Trump Administration has announced nominees for only a few dozen of the hundreds of positions in the various departments and agencies, though things have been moving somewhat faster for White House staffers who do not require Senate confirmation. Within both of these groups there have been some questionable choices. Here are some initial examples; more will come in later posts.

Kenneth Juster and Bridgepoint Education. In February Trump chose Kenneth Juster, a partner at the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, to be Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy. Prior to his appointment Juster was a member of the board of directors of Bridgepoint Education, an operator of for-profit colleges. He was a board representative for Warburg, which was an early backer of the company and which controls one-third of the firm’s shares.

As shown in Violation Tracker, in 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Board alleged that Bridgepoint deceived students into taking out private loans that cost more than advertised. The agency fined the company $8 million and ordered it to provide $23.5 million in relief and refunds to clients.

Michael Brown and Chesapeake Energy. Brown, an executive assistant to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, previously worked for Chesapeake Energy, the controversial fracking company based in Oklahoma. In 2013 the Environmental Protection Agency announced that a subsidiary of the company was being fined $3.2 million and would spend $6.5 million on site restoration to settle allegations that it violated the Clean Water Act through improper discharges into streams and wetlands.

Drew Maloney and Hess Corporation. Maloney, chosen to be the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs at the Treasury Department, previously worked at the oil company Hess. In 2012 the EPA announced that Hess would pay a penalty of $850,000 and spend more than $45 million on pollution control equipment to settle Clean Air Act allegations at its refinery in New Jersey.

These are but a few examples of the what might be called the tainted reverse revolving door. The term “revolving door” is used to refer to the movement of government officials into lobbying and other private sector jobs where they exploit connections made in their public positions. The reverse revolving door is the process by which private sector people take government posts in which they are likely to promote the priorities of their previous (and likely future) employers.

Not only is Trump filling his administration with people with a business background, but he’s selecting people from some of the worst companies the private sector has to offer.

Regulation is Not Dead Yet

Donald Trump tries to give the impression that his crusade against business regulation is moving ahead rapidly. While several rules have been rescinded and more are threatened, it turns out that for now the enforcement systems at most agencies are functioning normally.

In preparing a forthcoming update of the Violation Tracker database, I’ve found that since the inauguration federal regulatory agencies have announced more than 160 case resolutions with fines and settlements totaling more than $1.6 billion. This two-month dollar amount does not compare to the $20 billion collected by the Obama Administration during its final tens weeks in office. Yet it does show that the so-called administrative state is not dead yet.

A large portion of the Trump collections come from enforcement actions against a single company that are in line with the new president’s views. The Chinese telecommunications company ZTE was penalized $1.2 billion for violating economic sanctions against Iran and North Korea by supplying them with prohibited items. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security imposed a $661 million civil penalty and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control collected another $106 million while the Justice Department got ZTE to plead guilty and pay $430 million in fines and criminal forfeiture.

The remaining $422 million was collected in cases brought by 21 different agencies and four divisions of the Justice Department. Among the larger actions:

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission reached an $85 million settlement with the Royal Bank of Scotland to resolve allegations that it attempted to manipulate interest-rate benchmarks.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reached an $81 million settlement with GDF Suez to resolve allegations that it manipulated energy markets.
TeamHealth Holdings agreed to pay $60 million to settle Justice Department allegations that its subsidiary IPC Healthcare Inc. violated the False Claims Act by overbilling Medicare, Medicaid, the Defense Health Agency and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
Offshore oil driller Wood Group PSN was ordered to pay a total of $9.5 million to resolve criminal charges that it falsely reported over several years that its personnel had performed safety inspections on offshore facilities and that it negligently discharged oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Keurig Green Mountain agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle allegations by the Consumer Product Safety Commission that it failed to report a defect in its Mini Plus Brewing System that had caused scores of serious burn injuries.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau imposed a $3 million penalty on Experian for deceptively marketing credit scores.

The list also includes: 14 settlements with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by employers in cases involving gender, pregnancy and disability discrimination; six cases in which private sponsors of Medicare Advantage plans violated consumer protection rules; two cases in which companies were charged with violating the Controlled Substances Act by failing to properly monitor opioid prescriptions; and much more.

On the other hand, the situation remains puzzling at the Labor Department, where agencies such as OSHA have not announced a single enforcement action since Trump took office. [UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that despite the absence of OSHA press releases the agency is still posting enforcement actions on its website on this page, which shows numerous cases since Inauguration Day.]

It is likely that most of the 160 cases were initiated while the Obama Administration was in office, but it is heartening that they have gotten resolved under the new management. The career officials in the various agencies should be commended for continuing to do their job in difficult circumstances. Let’s hope they can convince their new bosses that there is a value to protecting consumers, workers and the public against corporate misconduct in its many forms.

Labor Unenforcement

Once upon a time, a key component of American populism was the demand for stricter controls over big business: in other words, regulation. Today, the country’s purported populist in chief is instead promoting the dubious claim that deregulation is what will benefit the masses. Through executive orders and now with his administration’s budget blueprint, Donald Trump is seeking an unprecedented rollback of workplace, environmental and consumer protections.

There are signs that at least one agency in the Trump Administration may not waiting for the legal changes to take effect before providing relief to business. In the eight weeks since the inauguration, the regulatory arms of the Labor Department appear to have been in a near state of suspended animation, at least in terms of their announced enforcement activity.

Take the case of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Since the inauguration it has not posted a single press release about an enforcement matter on the DOL website. This compares to more than 70 releases — about the filing of cases or the imposition of penalties — posted during the same period last year.

This can’t be explained by delays in a new administration getting up and running. During the comparable time period for the newly installed Obama Administration in 2009, OSHA made more than 30 enforcement announcements.

A similar pattern can be seen at DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, which under the Obama Administration aggressively pursued employers that violated minimum wage, overtime and other provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Since January 20, the WHD has made only one case announcement. By contrast, during the same period last year WHD announced 35 cases in which an employer was being sued or had settled allegations by agreeing to pay back wages and sometimes a monetary penalty. In 2009, right after Obama took office, the WHD announced 14 cases in the same period.

Other parts of the Labor Department are also quiet. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which makes sure government contractors comply with anti-discrimination laws, has not issued a single press release since inauguration day — on enforcement matters or anything else.

Enforcement is handled by career employees of the DOL, whose activities should not be affected by the delays in filling the Labor Secretary’s job, unless their work is being impeded by Trump’s appointed “beachhead” officials now running the department.

There are no indications that the work of DOL agencies has been suspended. Yet the almost complete disappearance of enforcement announcements may indicate that the Trump appointees have been holding up case resolutions or are choosing not to publicize those matters that have been resolved.

In any event, this enforcement lethargy may be a rehearsal for things to come. The Trump budget blueprint calls for a 21 percent reduction in DOL funding, and while the document provides limited details on what would be targeted, a cut of that size is bound to impair enforcement. How many workers who voted for Trump were seeking more dangerous conditions on the job and greater vulnerability to wage theft?

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that despite the absence of OSHA press releases the agency is still posting enforcement actions on its website on this page, which shows numerous cases since Inauguration Day.