Joe Biden Just Issued A Bunch Of Major Policies. They Could All Be Undone By 1 Thing.

The same goes for another big new climate rule: a plan to raise the construction standards for new homes that qualify for federal housing loans. It sounds wonky, but as Alex details in a separate article, there’s huge amounts of money at stake. Every time extreme heat waves hit, demand for air conditioning spikes — and with energy prices have roller-coastered ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Americans’ outstanding debt to utility surged to a record of over $20 billion last year.

Like the power plant rule, the housing requirements have already drawn blowback from Republicans in Congress and could easily draw Trump’s attention in a second term, given his frequent attacks on anything associated with green energy.

Similar threats loom for the new overtime rules — which, as HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson explained this week, are designed to help low-income workers who haven’t been able to collect overtime pay because they’re salaried.

Most hourly workers are entitled to time-and-a-half pay when they log over 40 hours, which discourages employers from working them too much. But whether salaried workers can get overtime pay depends on how much they earn and what their job duties are. Employers have an incentive to pile work onto those without overtime protections, since the extra work is done essentially for free.

The current overtime salary threshold is just $35,568 … Salaried workers, such as retail store managers, must earn less than that amount to automatically be entitled to any additional pay when they work more than 40 hours.

“This rule will restore the promise to workers that if you work more than 40 hours in a week, you should be paid more for that time,” Julie Su, acting Labor Secretary, said in a statement.

The new rules represent the second recent attempt by a Democratic administration to make more salaried workers eligible for overtime pay. Obama tried to do the same thing in 2016. Then a federal judge blocked the rule, and Trump later put in place the current, weaker standard.

Republicans haven’t jumped to oppose the overtime rules like they have the emission limits, perhaps because better pay for more workers sounds appealing even to many Republican voters.

But business groups to whom Republicans frequently listen have made clear they oppose these requirements, warning that they will force companies to raise prices, fire workers or shutter altogether — and that small businesses in particular will be vulnerable, because they are least able to absorb new costs.

Sean Kennedy, a spokesman for the National Restaurant Association, told CNN the new rules would “exponentially increase” costs for small establishments.

Critics of the Biden administration are also raising the specter of higher prices, layoffs and closures in response to the new nursing home regulations.

The rules set a minimum for the number of direct care staffers relative to the number of residents. Although the federal government has long required nursing homes to maintain adequate staff, this is the first time it has established a numerical standard.

The rule follows through on a promise Biden made in the 2022 State of the Union in response to media reports about poor conditions in nursing homes, especially during the pandemic, along with research linking staffing levels to patient well-being.

More than 80% of nursing homes do not meet the new standard, according to an analysis from KFF, a nonpartisan health care research organization. Nursing home industry officials say the cost of adding staff will push some facilities past the brink of failure.

“While it may be well intentioned, the federal staffing mandate is an unreasonable standard that only threatens to shut down more nursing homes, displace hundreds of thousands of residents, and restrict seniors’ access to care,” the American Health Care Association, a nursing home trade group, said in a press release.

But advocates for senior citizens and other longtime proponents of nursing home care reform are skeptical of these arguments, citing evidence that owners of long-term care facilities frequently use creative accounting to hide profits.

“When states have adopted minimum staffing standards — and many states have them, Massachusetts has one, California too ― it hasn’t put nursing homes out of business,” David Grabowski, a Harvard health policy expert and longtime champion for nursing home care reform, said in a phone interview. “I do think there’s money in the system here.”

Not that these advocates for reform are content. Most had pushed for even higher standards than the administration ultimately endorsed. And some, like Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, said he worries nursing homes will interpret the new minimum as a maximum, creating a “race to the bottom” as better-staffed institutions lay off workers.

Others have questioned some of the regulation’s specifics, including the way it allocates hours among different types of direct care workers.

Still, among the longtime promoters of stronger nursing home regulation, even those concerned about the Biden rules remember what happened back when Trump was in charge. The agenda was very different.

“They cut back on enforcement [of existing nursing home standards], anything that Obama did, they pulled back,” Toby Edelman, senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, told me .

And while there’s no way to know how aggressively the federal government would enforce these new rules if Biden gets a second term, Edelman said his focus on nursing home quality suggests these reforms are a big deal to him. “They are trying, the administration is trying,” she said.

You could say the same thing about Biden’s attention to workers ineligible for overtime, or to the climate dangers of dirty energy, or even to something as quotidian as the disruptions from canceled airline flights. Whatever the ultimate merits of these moves, as policy or law, they show Biden believes these are problems are worth addressing. It’s one more thing voters might want to consider in November.