There are quite a few potential scandals in the Trump administration. But one that might have an enormous impact on Americans is the Department of Labor’s attempt to make tip-stealing (via tip pools) more possible. In January, the Department of Labor began a process to reverse an Obama-era regulation that would have made tips the property of the company that owned the restaurant, not the server, and potentially cost servers billions. Soon after, reports began circulating that a government analysis showed serious risk of tip theft was covered up. And now it looks like that coverup goes straight to the top.
Bloomberg Law is reporting that Labor Secretary Alex Acosta went over the head of the government’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The OIRA isn’t very well known, but it has an important job, namely figuring out the exact impacts of laws and regulations and how the executive branch might implement them. A regulation generally has to be cleared by OIRA in order to move along in the process.
Instead, Acosta went to the OIRA’s boss, head of Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney, and asked that he end the dispute by throwing out OIRA’s estimates, which stated that works could lose billions. Mulvaney did, bringing us to now. That the government worked so hard to ignore a report stating millions of Americans could lose billions is bad enough, but there’s a further problem. It’s not a secret that the Trump administration hides data that disagrees with its political views, such as a report on the economic benefits of welcoming refugees. And it’s been noticed that formerly detailed reports are suddenly missing crucial information of public interest. So is there more data that isn’t being released? And if so, why is the Trump administration sitting on it?
(via Bloomberg Law)