Beltway Buzz, July 11, 2025

“One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” On July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump signed into law the massive legislative package that encapsulates Republicans’ priorities on taxation, energy production, healthcare, and immigration enforcement. Here are the key provisions for employers:

• No Taxes on Tips and Overtime. The legislation provides tax deductions for “qualified tips” (capped at $25,000) and overtime pay (capped at $12,500). Both of these provisions phase down based on income levels starting at $150,000 ($300,000 for those filing jointly). These provisions will expire on December 31, 2028, unless extended by the U.S. Congress. Victoria L. Vish and Stephen Kenney have the details.
• AI Moratorium. In a 99–1 vote, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment striking language included in the House-passed version that essentially banned states from regulating artificial intelligence for a period of ten years.

• Immigration
  • Enforcement. The new law earmarks approximately $170 billion for immigration enforcement measures. This includes funds to further construction of the wall along the southern border, build new detention centers, hire Customs and Border Protection personnel and construct their facilities, deploy new technology, and to reimburse local governments for their immigration enforcement activities.
  • Fee increases. Establishes new—or increases existing—costs relating to various immigration processing fees, primarily for asylum applicants, parolees, and temporary protected status (TPS) recipients. For example, the legislation sets a $550 work authorization fee for asylum applicants, parolees, and TPS recipients. Also included is a $250 “visa integrity fee,” adjusted yearly for inflation, that is required to be paid “by any alien issued a nonimmigrant visa at the time of such issuance.” The fee is to be reimbursed after the visa’s period of validity if the individual demonstrates compliance with the terms of the visa.

• Employee Benefits
  • Healthcare. Among other provisions, the legislation allows high deductible health plans to cover telehealth services before meeting the deductible and permits health savings account funds to be used to pay for direct primary care.
  • Extension and expansion of paid leave tax credit. The legislation makes permanent the paid family and medical leave tax credit contained in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It also makes the credit available on premiums paid for family and medical leave insurance policies, and lowers the employee qualification work period from one to six months (at the election of the employer).
  • Employer-provided child care tax credit. The law permanently increases the employer-provided child care tax credit up to $500,000, or $600,000 for qualifying small business owners. It also increases the amount of qualifying child care expenses from the current 25 percent to 40 percent. Carly E. Grey, Michael K. Mahoney, Stephanie A. Smithey, and Leah J. Shepherd have the details.

DOL Regulatory Agenda Kicks Into High Gear. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is moving ahead with a slew of regulatory actions, even before the administration releases its spring regulatory agenda. Here is the latest:

• Wage and Hour Division (WHD)
  • WHD has withdrawn the proposal that would have phased out subminimum wage certificates for certain workers with disabilities.
  • WHD is proposing to rescind the Obama-era regulation that limited the exemption from overtime and minimum wage requirements for workers providing “companionship services” or live-in domestic service employees (who are only exempt from overtime requirements). WHD maintains that the current regulation “might not reflect the best interpretation of the [Fair Labor Standards Act] and might discourage essential companionship services by making these services more expensive.” Comments are due by September 2, 2025.

• OSHA. John D. Surma has the scoop on the dozens of changes that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is proposing.

• Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS). OLMS is proposing significant increases to the threshold at which labor organizations must file certain annual financial reports. OLMS proposes $450,000 in annual receipts as the threshold by which labor organizations must file an LM-2 report (the current threshold is $250,000). According to the proposal, “These increases are necessary to reflect economic changes and reduce unnecessary reporting burdens on labor organizations whose total receipts, prior to adjusting for inflation, should not necessitate greater filing requirements.” Comments are due by July 31, 2025.

• Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). Lauren B. Hicks, T. Scott Kelly, and Zachary V. Zagger have all the details on the proposal to rescind regulations that implement the now-revoked Executive Order 11246.

Republican Senators Seek Portable Benefits for Independent Workers. On July 7, 2025, Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) (chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP)), Tim Scott (R-SC), and Rand Paul (R-KY) released a multi-bill legislative package to reform federal laws that they view as restricting the flexibility and earning power of independent workers. The legislation is the result of a year-long effort by Senator Cassidy, the various steps of which we’ve documented in the Buzz. The package includes the following four bills:

• Unlocking Benefits for Independent Workers Act. Under this bill’s provisions, benefits paid to workers would not be considered when determining whether a worker was an employee. The bill is similar to the Modern Worker Security Act in the U.S. House of Representatives.
• Modern Worker Empowerment Act. This bill would provide a simple test for determining independent contractor status under both the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Buzz discussed the companion bill in the House here.
• Association Health Plans Act. This bill would amend the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) to allow self-employed workers and small businesses to join together to access group healthcare coverage.
• Independent Retirement Fairness Act. This bill would allow “independent workers to participate in retirement plans, like pooled employer plans and single employee pension IRAs.”

No word yet on how or when these bills might be addressed by the Senate.

DOL Revises Policy on Liquidated Damages. WHD has issued a Field Assistance Bulletin setting forth the division’s new policy regarding liquidated damages. The bulletin rescinds an April 2021 Biden-era memo on the topic while declaring, “The Department may no longer request liquidated damages in any pre-litigation investigation or resolution.” According to the memo, “Congress has not clearly granted the Department the authority to supervise the payment of liquidated damages in administrative matters.” The bulletin represents the most recent policy turnabout on this issue, which began when Obama administration officials insisted on the payment of liquidated damages during settlement discussions.

DOL Sets Up New Office of Immigration Policy. According to a recent internal memo from Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the DOL will establish, on a temporary basis, the Office of Immigration Policy. According to the memo, the new office will, in part, “develop customer-centered policies … to improve access to employment-based visa programs, optimize program performance, and ensure use of the latest technologies to improve service delivery and continuity of operations.” The office is also instructed to “[m]anage priorities, expectations, and communications of immigration related initiatives and projects with external partners, including the Office of Management and Budget, United States Digital Service, Congress, press, and other relevant external stakeholders.”

ICE to Propose Fixed Admission Period for F-1 Students and J-1 Exchange Visitors. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a proposed rule to the Office of Information of Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) entitled, “Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students, Exchange Visitors, and Representatives of Foreign Information Media.” The first Trump administration published an identically named notice of proposed rulemaking in 2020 that would have set the admission and extension periods for F and J nonimmigrants “up to the program length, not to exceed a 2- or 4-year period.” That proposal was later withdrawn by the Biden administration. Once OIRA completes its review, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will presumably issue the proposed rule, which will begin the public comment period.

DHS Terminates TPS for Honduras, Nicaragua. On July 8, 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published notices in the Federal Register terminating the TPS designations of Honduras and Nicaragua. Both countries were originally designated for TPS in 1999, and those designations have been extended multiple times. The first Trump administration attempted to revoke the designations but withdrew those actions in response to legal challenges. The Biden administration subsequently extended the designations of both countries several times.

According to DHS, 72,000 individuals hold TPS under Honduras’s designation and 7,000 under Nicaragua’s designation. Termination of the TPS designation for both countries will become effective on September 8, 2025. Legal challenges to these most recent terminations have already been filed. W. First Born and Ashley Urquijo have the details.

Biometrics Rule Coming Soon? U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is under the aegis of DHS, sent to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) an interim final rule entitled “Collection of Biometric Data From Aliens Upon Entry To and Exit From the United States.” The effort resuscitates a proposal issued in November 2020 during the first Trump administration, which would have amended existing regulations to permit DHS to collect biometrics from aliens entering or departing the country. The proposal was never finalized and was withdrawn by the Biden administration in 2021.

Proceeding under this fashion means that upon completion of OIRA review, CBP can skip the notice-and-comment process and immediately publish a final rule (it also likely provides additional grounds for potential legal challenges). As the Buzz discussed several months ago, the administration takes the position that efforts “to control the status, entry, and exit of people … across the borders of the United States, constitute a foreign affairs function of the United States under the Administrative Procedure Act,” which provides an exception to the traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking protocols.

Employee Rights Act Reintroduced. Representative Rick W. Allen (R-GA), who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, has introduced the Employee Rights Act of 2025. We’ve seen this bill before, but this time it has been updated to add provisions that would:

• explicitly amend the NLRA to ensure that employers can maintain workplaces that are free from harassment;
• make it an unfair labor practice to include diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) provisions in a collective bargaining agreement (CBA);
• prohibit “[a]ny employee who does not have lawful [immigration] status” “and who is a member of a labor organization” from voting in union elections; and
• clarify that violence undertaken in pursuit of a labor dispute or objective is a federal crime.

To Coin a Phrase. Seventy years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law H.R. 619, which requires the phrase “In God We Trust” to be inscribed on all U.S. currency. The bill was introduced in the House by Charles E. Bennett, a Democrat from Florida. (Bennett served in the House from 1949 to 1993, the longest-serving member from Florida in either the House or Senate.) Besides the obvious religious connotation, Bennett and his supporters appealed to Cold War sentiments while promoting their bill. Readers may recall that Salmon P. Chase, while secretary of the treasury, ordered the phrase printed on certain coins, but Bennett’s legislation made the phrase applicable to all currency.