Contact Your Senators and Urge them to Support Repeal
In the final year of the Obama administration, federal agencies issued nearly 4,000 new regulations. Many of those regulations negatively impact the construction industry. Congress—through the Congressional Review Act (CRA)—has an opportunity to repeal just a handful of Obama-era regulations issued after approximately May 30, 2016.
Among the most unnecessary and burdensome regulations are those implementing the former president’s “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” Executive Order 13673, commonly called the Blacklisting Executive Order. The Senate is expected to vote to repeal the Blacklisting regulations early next week.  Contact your senators and ask them to support repeal of these regulations.
Under the Blacklisting regulations, both prime contractors and subcontractors would report violations of 14 federal labor laws and undefined state labor laws before contract award and again every six months after contract award on federal contracts (not federally-assisted contracts) exceeding $500,000. Federal contracting officers would then determine if contractors would be allowed to bid on federal construction work based on their labor law compliance record.
Such a process would introduce a significant degree of subjectively into the federal construction procurement process. It would allow federal contracting officers to effectively debar—or blacklist—companies without the protections of due process afforded under suspension and debarment proceedings. It would also layer a new federal procurement bureaucracy above contracting officers—in the form of labor compliance advisors—which would further delay the procurement process.
For more information, contact Jimmy Christianson at [email protected] or (703) 837-5325.