Beltway Buzz, May 15, 2026

Time is Ticking on the 119th Congress. Both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives returned to Washington, D.C., after being out last week. Believe it or not, with the mid-term elections, scheduled breaks, and holidays, there are not many days left in the 119th Congress in which the Senate and House will both be present in Washington, D.C. For example, there are only twenty-four such days until the August Recess, thirty-five such days until current government funding expires, and thirty-six such days until the midterm elections. Following the elections, there will be a lame-duck legislative session lasting approximately four weeks. Congress has a lot to do and little time to do it. And because all bills expire at the end of this current Congress (on January 3, 2027), these next few months could be a period of significant legislative activity, though most employment-related bills are still unlikely to be enacted, mostly due to the legislative filibuster in the Senate.

DOL Officially Reinstates 2019 Overtime Regulations. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) performed some regulatory housekeeping this week as a result of its recent decision to drop its defense of the 2024 Fair Labor Standards Act overtime regulations. On May 15, 2026, the DOL published a final rule in the Federal Register that scrubs the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) to remove the Biden-era regulation promulgated in 2024 and to reinstate the 2019 regulations issued during the first Trump administration. The 2019 regulations have been the standard that the DOL has enforced since the Biden-era rule was vacated in November 2024. As the notice describes, “[T]his final rule merely conforms the text in the CFR to reflect the courts’ vacatur of the 2024 rule by removing the 2024 rule regulatory text and replacing it with the text from the 2019 rule.” Keith E. Kopplin and Zachary V. Zagger have the details.

“Faster Labor Contracts Act” Picks Up Steam. The Buzz is monitoring the ongoing effort in the House to force a vote on the Faster Labor Contracts Act. The pending discharge petition has been signed by 214 representatives—just 4 signatures short of the 218 required to force a vote on the House floor. Four Republicans have now signed the petition.

House Lawmakers Examine Workplace Safety Innovations. On May 13, 2026, the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections held a hearing, titled, “Building a Safer Future: Private-Sector Strategies for Emerging Safety Issues.” The hearing focused on how employer-sponsored initiatives, such as the adoption of new technologies, can advance workplace safety even in the absence of prescriptive standards. Ogletree Deakins shareholder, Melissa K. Peters, who testified at the hearing, warned against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) preference for prescriptive rulemaking, which takes too long and is “too rigid to keep pace with technology and too broad to reflect the disparateness of the regulated workforce.” Instead, Peters advocated for performance-based or goal-focused standards that allow employers to “calibrate their programs to the actual hazards they face and let[] recent technology satisfy the rule without waiting for OSHA to catch up.” According to Peters, OSHA’s pending heat injury and illness prevention standard would benefit. Peters further recommended that OSHA take a performance-based approach, should the agency choose to proceed with its pending heat injury and illness prevention standard.

House to Vote on Student-Athlete Reform Bill. Next week, the House is expected to vote on the “Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act,” which would set new rules for the college athletics landscape. This includes protecting student-athletes’ ability to enter into “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) licensing agreements, changing coaches’ hiring timelines, and setting a five-year eligibility cap for student-athletes. But at the Buzz, we are most interested in provisions of the bill that would expressly prohibit student-athletes from being classified as “employees.” This bill came close to a floor vote in the House several months ago, but it was pulled at the last minute. The Buzz will have more on this next week.

Discharge Deep Dive. The House rule allowing members to discharge bills stuck in committees, as discussed above in relation to the Faster Labor Contracts Act, is a relatively new congressional phenomenon. The first iteration of the rule was adopted in 1910 as part of a series of maneuvers to check the power of then-Speaker Joseph Cannon, a Republican from Illinois. The process has changed over the ensuing years. In the 1930s, the number of required signatories was lowered from 145 (one-third of the House) to 218—a simple majority. The signatories to discharge petitions were never publicly disclosed until a 1993 rule change championed by then-representative James Inhofe of Oklahoma made the entire process transparent.

Measuring the success of discharge petitions has proved difficult, as the filing of a petition sometimes prompts leadership to take up the underlying bill, and the petition effort is subsequently abandoned. However, at least one estimate claims that of the 635 discharge petitions filed between 1935 and 2023, less than 4 percent have garnered the necessary 218 signatories. Of those, only four discharge efforts—at most—have ever resulted in enacted legislation during that time frame. The first of these successful efforts was the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, a frequent topic here at the Buzz.