Eugene Scalia, Obama Labor Department foe, confirmed to head agency under Trump

Scalia, 56, son of the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, replaces Alex Acosta, who resigned amid controversy over his handling of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein case. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Scalia led efforts by business groups that undermined the previous administration’s attempts to implement labor-friendly policies and enact new regulations on the financial industry.

As a lawyer, Scalia led legal challenges to Labor Department rules on ergonomics, retirement security, and injury reporting. As labor secretary, he would be charged with enforcing federal rules and regulations covering those subjects as well as ones for overtime pay, workplace safety, anti-discrimination, and monitoring organized labor. He would also be able to initiate efforts to rewrite the rules.

Scalia was the agency’s solicitor, its third-ranking position, during the George W. Bush administration. Colleagues describe him as a leading expert in his field. “There is no finer legal mind in the field of labor and employment law,” Gregory Jacob, a partner with the management-side firm O’Melveny, told the Washington Examiner. “Gene knows the subject, knows the department, and will bring his trademark energy and charisma to implementing sensible reforms to regulations.”

He has vowed to approach the job of secretary differently from his private sector work. “[O]nce at the department, I had new clients, new responsibilities and, above all, I had a public trust,” he said in his confirmation hearing, referring to his work at the agency as solicitor. “I am proud of the actions I took before as a solicitor to further the department’s mission.”

The Trump administration and congressional Republicans moved with notable speed to secure Scalia’s confirmation. The nominee had his first Senate hearing on Sept. 17 and was endorsed by the full committee on a party-line vote on Tuesday. Democrats accused Scalia of favoring businesses over workers.

Scalia was one of the attorneys retained by the Chamber of Commerce when it challenged the Labor Department’s 2017 “fiduciary rule,” which would have required all advisers managing tax-privileged retirement accounts to act in their clients’ best interests, a legal standard that Obama sought to crack down on conflicts of interest. The Chamber’s legal team argued it broadened the definition of fiduciary too far, clashed with existing regulations, and involved a regulatory change that only Congress could approve. A federal court agreed and vacated the rule last year.

He was also lead attorney in Boeing v. National Labor Relations Board, a high-profile case for the NLRB, the main federal labor law enforcement agency. The board sought to penalize the company for opening a factory in a South Carolina, a right-to-work state, on the grounds that that this constituted retaliation against the company’s union. The case could have set a major precedent that operating right-to-work states, where unions are prohibited from demanding dues or related payments from nonmember workers, could be evidence of anti-union bias by a business. The case was eventually settled out of court in late 2011.

During the Clinton administration, Scalia led a successful Chamber effort in 1998 to stop the Occupational Health and Safety Administration from implementing a policy called “cooperative compliance.” It would have required workplaces with injury and illness rates above the norm for their industry to either voluntarily develop comprehensive safety programs with OSHA or face more frequent inspections.

Scalia, who has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from the University of Chicago, is married with seven children.