Legislative gap analysis, regulatory blind spots, and policy insights.
OSHA has scheduled informal public hearings beginning August 19, 2026 for deregulatory actions. That procedural step creates a planning gap for employers, workers, and counsel: organizations may begin evaluating scenarios based on hearing posture before final rule text is available.
Read post →EPA's 2024 designation of PFOA and PFOS as CERCLA hazardous substances means that any entity that released or arranged for disposal of these chemicals can face strict, joint and several Superfund liability. That includes municipalities, publicly owned treatment works (POTWs), airports, and fire departments that received PFAS-contaminated waste from industrial sources — as passive receivers, not generators. EPA has issued an enforcement discretion policy for these entities. But enforcement discretion is not a statutory exemption, and it can be withdrawn by any future administration without notice-and-comment rulemaking.
Read post →OSHA published a proposed rule for heat illness prevention in August 2024. No specific federal heat standard has yet taken effect. Workers in states covered by federal OSHA remain protected only by the general duty clause — a broad, less prescriptive obligation that has significant limitations as a heat enforcement tool. The gap between where rulemaking stands and where binding protection exists affects tens of millions of American workers.
Read post →Federal agencies have moved from policy rhetoric to rule text on payment stablecoins. The June 5, 2026 Federal Register proposal from the FDIC makes that shift explicit. But the current comment-period structure still leaves a practical gap: market participants can see the direction of travel, yet many implementation obligations remain undefined at the operator level.
Read post →Congress passed the No Surprises Act to protect patients from unexpected out-of-network bills. But the implementing regulations for its arbitration process — the independent dispute resolution (IDR) mechanism that determines what insurers actually pay providers — have been repeatedly challenged in federal court. The Fifth Circuit issued an en banc opinion in this litigation on May 30, 2025. Because the opinion's effect and subsequent agency implementation require reading the decision and current guidance together, this post does not characterize the present enforceability of individual regulatory provisions.
Read post →The Federal Trade Commission's 2024 noncompete rule would have created the first uniform federal prohibition on most post-employment noncompete clauses. A federal court vacated it in August 2024. The FTC dropped its appeals in September 2025. The result is a clean regulatory gap: no federal floor, no uniform standard, and a fragmented 50-jurisdiction patchwork that employers and workers must now navigate on their own.
Read post →Federal agencies are already using artificial intelligence on sensitive data. GAO's March 2026 report says the government's overarching privacy guidance still does not fully tell agencies which AI privacy risks they must account for. That is not just a policy critique. It is a live regulatory gap.
Read post →EPA's landmark 2024 PFAS drinking water rule set enforceable federal maximum contaminant levels for the first time. But those limits apply only to public water systems. The roughly 43 million Americans who rely on private wells remain outside the regulatory perimeter — a structural gap in the Safe Drinking Water Act that EPA cannot close on its own.
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