Beltway Buzz, May 16, 2025

Republican Legislators Push Ahead With Agenda. This week, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Ways and Means advanced—on a party-line 26–19 vote—a tax reform package that included Republicans’ top fiscal priorities. The bill makes permanent many provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and includes other measures, such as an expansion of the child tax credit. Of particular interest to the Buzz, the bill also provides temporary (2025 through 2028 tax years) above-the-line deductions for qualified tips and overtime premium pay. There is still quite a long way to go for this bill, and changes are expected, especially considering that some Republicans in the U.S. Senate have already expressed some reservations about the proposal.

OMB Approves EEO-1 Changes. On May 12, 2025, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved changes to the EEO-1 form that removes employers’ option to disclose non-binary employee data. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requested the changes pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The proposed instruction booklet filed with OMB indicates that the 2024 EEO-1 filing period would begin on May 20, 2025. There has been no word yet from the EEOC in light of OMB’s approval of the change. Kiosha H. Dickey and James A. Patton, Jr. have the details.

PBGC Nominee on the Move. On May 15, 2025, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions voted to advance the nomination of Janet Dhillon to serve as the director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, PBGC protects workers’ retirement benefits through its single-employer and multiemployer insurance programs. Dhillon previously served as chair of the EEOC. Her nomination now awaits a vote on the Senate floor.

House Committee Examines OSHA. On May 15, 2025, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Workforce Protections held a hearing entitled “Reclaiming OSHA’s Mission: Ensuring Safety Without Overreach.” The hearing focused on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) regulatory and enforcement agenda during the Biden administration and “explore[d] common-sense solutions that can return OSHA to fulfilling its purpose of advancing workplace safety.” Legislators and witnesses discussed OSHA’s proposed heat standard, the final “walkaround rule,” and the Severe Violator Enforcement Program. With regard to OSHA’s heat proposal, Republicans and their witnesses criticized its one-size-fits-all proscriptions—arguments that are likely to be made at OSHA’s public hearing on the proposal in June.

Disparate Impact Follow-Up. President Trump’s recent executive order directing federal agencies to limit the use of disparate-impact theories of liability is having a ripple effect at implementing agencies and among stakeholders. Here is the latest fallout:

• Department of Energy Rescinds Regulations. The U.S. Department of Energy—not an agency that we normally deal with at the Buzz—took steps this week to rescind forty-seven regulations. Included is a direct-to-final rule, entitled, “Rescinding Regulations Related to Nondiscrimination in Federally Assisted Programs or Activities (General Provisions).” With regard to a regulatory provision concerning nondiscrimination in federally assisted programs or activities, the direct-to-final rule states the following:

Furthermore, absent a specific, identified, instance of intentional discrimination, statistical information indicating that certain protected groups are underrepresented in some occupations or professions does not obligate any FFA [federal financial assistance] recipient to take remedial or affirmative action under this part. To the contrary, any affirmative action for which “measures of success” depend on “whether some proportional goal has been reached” amounts to “outright racial balancing” which is “patently unconstitutional.” For these reasons, DOE is rescinding 10 CFR 1040.8 in its entirety.

While not directly impacting private-sector employment policy, the move provides some clues as to how federal agencies will respond to President Trump’s recent executive order.

• Former EEO Officials Respond. While federal agencies begin implementing the executive order (EO), former EEOC and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) officials issued a statement challenging the legal rationale underlying the EO, noting that President Trump’s executive order “may not change a clear statutory mandate and decades of legal precedent.” The statement further notes that contrary to the EO’s claim that the disparate impact theory eliminates meritocracy in the workplace, “disparate impact liability is a means to ensure that merit prevails and that unnecessary and unjustified criteria do not disqualify meritorious candidates on grounds linked to their race, sex, or other protected personal characteristic.” To be sure, the statement will have no impact on the administration’s current views, but it does serve as a reminder to employers and workers that while disparate impact may be deprioritized by the administration, it is still codified in federal law, has been affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States, and is a viable legal theory for plaintiffs’ counsel.

Immigration: TPS Update.

• In a notice published in the Federal Register on May 13, 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it would not extend the designation of Afghanistan for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is set to terminate on May 20, 2025. Pursuant to the required sixty-day notice period, TPS for Afghanistan will now expire on July 14, 2025. According to the notice, “there are notable improvements in the security and economic situation such that requiring the return of Afghan nationals to Afghanistan does not pose a threat to their personal safety due to armed conflict or extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

• Venezuela TPS. A bipartisan group of representatives has introduced the Venezuela TPS Act of 2025. The bill would automatically designate Venezuela for TPS for eighteen months—with an option for renewal—from the time the bill is enacted. Of course, enactment will be a significant challenge in the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress. Pursuant to a federal court ruling, Venezuela’s TPS designation has been extended through October 2, 2026, and work authorization remains valid through April 2, 2026.

RIP, Justice Souter. Supreme Court Justice David Souter died last week at the age of eighty-five. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush, Souter served on the Supreme Court from 1990 to 2009. The Buzz remembers Souter for his role in authoring two significant Supreme Court decisions on employment law. Souter authored the majority opinion in Faragher v. City of Boca Raton (1998), which held that “an employer is vicariously liable for actionable discrimination caused by a supervisor, but subject to an affirmative defense looking to the reasonableness of the employer’s conduct as well as that of a plaintiff victim.” Additionally, in Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (2008)—a disparate-impact case under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) involving a reduction in force—the Court held that the employer, not the employee, has the burden of proving that its employment decision was based on reasonable factors other than age. Souter, writing for the 7–1 majority, stated that while “there is no denying that putting employers to the work of persuading factfinders that their choices are reasonable makes it harder and costlier to defend[,]” the Court must read the ADEA “the way Congress wrote it.”