Regulatory Reform - May 2017

Last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction halting the implementation of President Obama’s new overtime regulations. The regulations, previously scheduled to take effect on December 1st are a declaration of war on job flexibility and small employers, imposing new compliance costs and limiting employment arrangements in pursuit of big government social engineering. Given the large costs and dubious benefits, the Obama administration’s justifications for these massive, expensive, meddling regulations were always suspect as policy matter, but now a federal judge has agreed with the 21 states challenging the regulations and recognized them as probably illegal as well.