Trump Administration Cancels Oppressive Obama Employment Regulations
John Hinderaker, Powerline
This is one of many similar stories we have seen over the past seven months, which cause one to question the judgment of those who claim to be conservatives, but who favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. The Free Beacon reports: “Trump Rolls Back Onerous Diversity Regs.”
The Trump administration blocked Obama-era rules that would have saddled employers with hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs and increased paperwork loads by millions of hours each year.
The Office of Management and Budget instructed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to shelve a rule change that would have required employers to submit 20 times as much data to the agency as previously required. The Obama administration called for the new standards, which would have affected 61,000 American companies with more than 100 workers and federal contractors with more than 50 workers, to demonstrate his commitment to closing the much-disputed “gender wage gap.”
That would be the same “gender wage gap” that existed in Barack Obama’s own White House.
Obama’s EEOC called for businesses to provide 3,660 different data points about each employee and their pay structure, up from the 188 points.
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The agency estimated the new regulations would cost employers $53.5 million and take about 1.9 million hours to complete. Those numbers paled in comparison to the findings of a survey conducted by the Chamber of Commerce, which estimated the regulations would cost $400 million and increase work hours by 8 million—if additional overhead is taken into account the rules could cost up to $1.3 billion.
This was one of many regulations that the lame duck Obama administration put in place, or set in motion, while it was on its way out the door. President Obama didn’t want to take responsibility for such absurdly burdensome regulations while still in office, but left them as poison pills for his successor. The Trump administration has wisely killed a number of such wasteful and pointless regulations.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, called on the Trump administration to block the rules in an April letter. He welcomed the OMB decision in a statement, saying the EEOC should use its resources to address a “backlog of more than 73,000 unresolved complaints of discrimination,” rather than engage in new rulemaking.
“This agency is supposed to be protecting American workers from discrimination. Instead the EEOC came up with an absurd mandate forcing employers to submit new pay data on 63 million private sector employees,” Alexander said in a statement.
Kudos to Donald Trump and his administration. If Congressional Republicans would quit sniping at President Trump and instead try to match his performance in office, we could get somewhere.
