The Labor Department’s top lawyer has received an ethics clearance to oversee what is arguably the agency’s most controversial rulemaking, despite her father’s fingerprints on a case involving it, a DOL spokesman confirmed to Bloomberg Law.
Kate O’Scannlain, an appointee of President Donald Trump who was recently sworn in as solicitor of labor, is the daughter of Ninth Circuit Senior Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain. The judge authored a scathing dissent arguing that the Obama-era DOL rule to ban certain tip-pooling arrangements is illegal. In turn, the Trump administration issued a proposal in December to reverse that 2011 regulation by questioning the ...