What You Need to Know
- Labor's EBSA oversees regulations on retirement plans, including fiduciary rules for those who advise them.
- Lisa Gomez is likely to receive a bipartisan Senate confirmation to lead the agency by year-end, lawyer Brad Campbell said.
- Labor is not going to meet its December deadline to release a new fiduciary rule, Campbell and Reish opine.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee plans to vote Thursday on Lisa Gomez’s nomination to head the Labor Department’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, the agency overseeing retirement plan rules.
In late July, President Joe Biden nominated Gomez, a partner at Cowen Weiss and Simon in New York, to head EBSA.
Brad Campbell, partner at Faegre Drinker’s Washington office and former head of EBSA, said on the law firm’s recent Inside the Beltway webcast that Gomez is likely to receive a bipartisan Senate confirmation by year-end.
During her confirmation hearing before the HELP Committee in early October, Gomez — who will be central in helping Labor craft a new fiduciary rule — said that if confirmed, she looks forward to working with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as with Labor “to be briefed on the efforts of looking at the definition of a fiduciary in different contexts, and taking another look at the conflict of interest rule and how it would apply in different situations.”