In the past week or so, a LOT of new legislation (or, more accurately, policy changes from government entities) have gone through:
- The FTC banned nearly all non-compete agreements
- A great number of salaried workers will be eligible for overtime pay as the salary cap increases over the next two years
- TikTok has been banned if the parent company doesn’t sell its US division to a US-based company within the next 9 months to a year
- Airlines now have to give cash refunds for basically every corner case that they used to abuse
- And finally, the FCC just voted to restore net neutrality
With the debatable exception of the TikTok ban, these are all really good changes! And they’re all essentially happening at once. What’s going on? Is this just election season? Is it just coincidence? Or is something else causing this?
I can’t speak to all of them, but most of these are new regulations issued by different executive departments under the authority of existing laws, not new legislation. A lot of these regulations have been in the works for some time, but they all require waiting and comment periods. So the basic flow with a new administration being elected is: new appointees need to get confirmed (Republicans hold up a lot of appointees so this takes time), new appointees then direct crafting of new regulations by agency civil servants that better align with the current administration’s goals, then preliminary regulations go into mandatory comment and review periods, then regulations get finalized and get final votes by respective agency commissioners, and then another period before they take effect. All of this takes time so a lot of these big regulation changes can’t really happen early in an administration. The FTC non compete preliminary regulation was issued over a year ago for instance and it took this long to get through all 26,000 comments and complete more reviews. And if they don’t get them done this year, there’s a chance a new administration comes in and scraps them before they’re implemented, I’m sure that’s some motivation.
Trump’s appointees issued a lot of rapid regulations early in their admin, and a lot of those got overturned by courts for failing to follow the necessary procedures for new regulations, skipping reviews and things. Hopefully a lot of these postive new regulations by Biden appointees will stand up better in the courts by following proper procedures.
The TikTok thing was to help sweeten the deal for conservatives to help get Ukraine aid passed, as the TikTok ban/forced sale has been something conservative house members especially have been asking for for awhile now.
Cool, thanks!
my only concern with TikTok is the double standard involved - facebook, twitter, youtube etc are all blocked in China - but we’re supposed to be ok with this? I don’t think it’s worth this kind of posturing but perhaps biden’s trying to use it as a lever to engage concessions in other places.