Beltway Buzz, July 24, 2026

EEOC Issues Proposal to Eliminate EEO-1 Report. In conjunction with its public meeting held on July 21, 2026, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to rescind regulations in place since 1966 requiring covered employers to file annual EEO-1 reports detailing the demographics of their workforces. According to the proposal’s preamble, “EEO Reports are inconsistent with EEO law because they may encourage employers to discriminate against employees who are not considered ‘minorities,’ may promote racial stereotyping, and may encourage employers to engage in discrimination to avoid potential EEOC enforcement actions or to address perceived inequitable outcomes.” The Commission cites cost as a factor, noting, “In the last five years alone, the Commission has incurred over $18,000,000 in federal contractor costs collecting these data.” The proposal states that the Commission still retains the authority to request records relevant to a charge investigation and that “[t]he Commission views its investigative authority as a more reliable, narrowly tailored, and cost-effective tool to support its enforcement efforts.” Comments on the proposal are due on or before August 24, 2026, and the EEOC will hold a public hearing on the matter on August 11, 2026. T. Scott Kelly, James A. Patton, Jr., Kiosha H. Dickey, and Zachary V. Zagger have the details.

House Committee Advances Labor and Employment Bills. On July 21, 2026, the House Committee on Education and Workforce approved two bills of interest to the employer community. The American Franchise Act (H.R. 5267) ensures that, under both the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a franchisor is only a joint employer of employees of a franchisee when it exercises “substantial direct and immediate control” over the terms and conditions of employment of those employees. The second bill, the Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2025 (H.R. 6213), would prohibit the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from finalizing and enforcing the agency’s 2024 heat illness and injury prevention proposal, “or any substantially similar standard.” The bills now advance to the House floor.

Senate Democrat, Republican, Team Up on Paid Leave. Senators John Boozman (R-AR) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) are cosponsoring the More Paid Leave for More Americans Act (S. 5017). The legislation would establish a program administered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to provide grants to states that enact paid family and medical leave programs. The legislation would also create an “Interstate Paid Leave Action Network” to promote consistency among the states’ paid leave provisions. A similar bipartisan bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

DOL Issues New Wage and Hour Opinion Letters. This week, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division issued two new opinion letters concerning remote-work situations.

• The first scenario, outlined in opinion letter FLSA2026-9, involves a nonexempt employee who wants to work from home at the beginning of the day, then commute to the office mid-morning (to avoid the early morning traffic), work at the office, then commute home in the mid-afternoon (to avoid the late-afternoon rush hour), and finally end the day working at home. The question presented in the opinion letter is whether the two commutes—because they occur within the workday rather than immediately before and after it—are compensable. The opinion letter concludes that this commuting time “would not qualify as FLSA-covered ‘work,’ as the facts provided indicate that such travel time would be an ‘ordinary’ commute that is a normal incident of employment.”
• The second opinion letter, FLSA2026-10, involves a field service engineer who drives an employer-provided car. The engineer does not report to an office, but rather receives assignments in the morning and spends the day “installing and servicing equipment at client sites.” Pursuant to the opinion letter, the time the engineer spends each morning receiving pages and the day’s assignments is not compensable, because it is “incidental to the use of an employer’s vehicle.” The alternative of requiring the engineer to first report to a central office to receive these assignments “would frustrate the convenience of a program allowing employees who work at multiple job sites per day to drive an employer-provided vehicle directly to and from home.” On the other hand, the time the engineer spends “calling clients to schedule and arrange the details of appointments, including scheduling other field service engineers,” is compensable. Further, after the engineer begins scheduling client visits, he or she must be compensated for the time spent driving to the first client location of the day because the travel occurs during the workday and is not an “ordinary commute.”

Unpacking FDR’s Court Packing Plan. Eighty-nine years ago this week, the U.S. Senate voted against the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 by an overwhelming vote of 70–20. In November 1936, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt won election to his second term of office, he began pushing for a legislative fix to the Supreme Court of the United States, which he viewed as a body frustrating his New Deal agenda. His solution was the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill—colloquially referred to as FDR’s “court-packing plan”—which was introduced in Congress in early February of 1937. The bill would have added a justice to the Supreme Court for every member of the Court over the age of seventy years old who did not retire.

FDR lobbied for the bill during one of his fireside chats and even sent his attorney general, Homer S. Cummings, to testify in favor of the bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee. While FDR had a long way to go to convince legislators of the bill’s merits, his efforts were further undermined by intervening events, such as the death of the bill’s champion, Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson (D-AR), and the retirement of Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter (giving FDR an opportunity to appoint a justice). Finally, the Supreme Court’s decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), in which Associate Justice Owen Roberts switched his position on the constitutionality of the New Deal and voted to uphold the constitutionality of minimum wage laws, undercut FDR’s rationale for increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court beyond nine. This is why the case is often referred to as the “switch in time that saved nine.”