by Owen Klinsky
North Carolina Republican Virginia Foxx wrote to acting Department of Labor (DOL) Secretary Julie Su on Monday to assure her that the agency will continue to address matters throughout the remainder of President Joe Biden’s term. deadline.
During the transition from former president in 2016–2017 Barack Obama According to President-elect Donald Trump, the DOL has slowed or stopped processing cases, creating a backlog of “hundreds of cases” and preventing ordinary Americans from accessing needed aid such as workers’ compensation, According to to a House Education and Workforce Committee review letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Now Foxx is trying to prevent Biden’s DOL from engaging in similar obstructive behavior by asking the DOL to provide weekly updates to the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs from December 6 until shortly before Inauguration Day.
“The Commission understood that under the Obama administration, the DOL either significantly slowed or stopped processing cases in 2016–2017, leaving the incoming Trump administration with a backlog of hundreds of cases,” Foxx wrote. “These avoidable and unreasonable delays have hampered the work of the new administration and delayed justice for hundreds of Americans.”
The letter argues that the House Education and Labor Committee retains the authority to review the status of DOL cases under Rule of House Xwhich provides that the commission has jurisdiction and duty “to continually review and examine… the application, administration, enforcement and effectiveness of laws and programs relating to matters within its jurisdiction.”
Trump’s first presidency faced significant domestic resistance from various government bureaucrats, with Miles Taylor, then chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, even going so far as to publishing an anonymous article in the New York Times in which he vows to “thwart some [Trump’s] program and its worst tendencies. Now some members of Congress, along with Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and other lawmakers, are trying to avoid strengthening Trump’s second resistance writing a letter to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management seeking to deter Biden from political activities appointed before conversion to civil service positions – a process sometimes called ‘burrowing in’.
“The Obama administration’s backlog of 2016-2017 must never be repeated,” Foxx states in the letter. “The outgoing Trump administration has decided not to follow the example of the Obama administration and instead continue to consider and finalize these matters in 2020–2021 until the end of the transition period. I challenge you to do the same.”
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Owen Klinsky is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Re.p Virginia Foxx” by Representative Virginia Foxx and “Julie Su” by US Department of Labor.
