What Happens to the New FLSA Salary Test Under President Trump?

If you take a look at Trump’s campaign website, he has an entire page dedicated to “Regulations.” And Trump does not like regulations. What did his campaign promise he’d do to regulations once becoming president?

• Ask all department heads to submit a list of every wasteful and unnecessary regulation which kills jobs … and eliminate them.
• Reform the entire regulatory code to ensure that we keep jobs and wealth in America.
• Issue a temporary moratorium on new agency regulations that are not compelled by Congress or public safety in order to give our American companies the certainty they need to reinvest in our community, get cash off of the sidelines, start hiring again, and expanding businesses. We will no longer regulate our companies and our jobs out of existence.
• Decrease the size of our already bloated government after a thorough agency review.

If you ask any small business owner, the FLSA’s new salary test checks each of these Trumpian boxes.

Yet, this issue was not one on which Trump focused during the campaign. In the only campaign interview I could locate that touched on this subject, he did not call for repealing the upcoming FLSA changes outright, but instead called for “a delay or a carve-out of sorts for our small business owners.”

One possible solution? Take a look the bipartisan H.R. 5813, which would phase in the new salary test over four years, and eliminate its triennial re-indexing. If you are looking for potential models Trump might adopt, you could do a lot worse for a starting point.

The bottom line. You cannot, and should not, hope for a reprieve from these rules at the 11th hour. The new salary test is coming, regardless of what Trump may choose to do after the fact.

In other words, if you’re not prepared for these new rules, you better get prepared, and quickly, because in 16 days they become the reality of every business.