Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump's Anti-Regulation Era Has Already Begun

An activist ruling blocked Obama's overtime expansion.

November 30, 2016 at 9:46 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Cutting red tape already.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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When a federal judge in Texas last week froze a regulation extending overtime pay to thousands of workers, the holding had an extra sting. The hit to President Barack Obama’s legacy came from his own appointee, not a Bush-era holdover. And the decision will make it much simpler for President-elect Donald Trump’s Labor Department to scrap the regulation than it would have been without the judge’s activist ruling.

The regulation in question interprets the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. The law sets the federal minimum wage (currently $7.25 an hour), and says that employees who work more than 40 hours a week are entitled to time and a half -- that is, overtime.