Employee Ownership Blog
Loren Rodgers

Loren Rodgers

DOL Employee Ownership Head Reinstated

On March 7, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) was notified that all probationary employees at the Department of Labor who received termination notices on February 21, including Employee Ownership Division chief Hilary Abell, would be reinstated. The reinstatement will be effective as of Monday, March 10, according to the Plan Sponsor Council of America.
 
Lisa Gomez, the former head of the Employee Benefit Security Administration (EBSA), said, "With the decades of experience she brought to the role, Hilary's contributions to EBSA's Division of Employee Ownership have built a critical and meaningful connection between the Department of Labor and the employee ownership community. Without her reinstatement, that foundational work would have been needlessly lost."

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Loren Rodgers

Employee-Owned Companies and Foreign Aid

The extensive coverage of President Trump’s executive order to halt payments for foreign aid has missed one of the order’s unintended consequences: the impact it will have on the thousands of people who work at U.S.-based employee-owned companies that implement many USAID projects. Companies that have employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are heavily represented among the contractors affected by the executive order.

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Loren Rodgers

The Rescinded Spending Freeze, the Employee Buyout, and Employee Ownership

On January 29, the Trump administration appears to have rescinded its executive order freezing federal grant funding. A prior order freezing foreign aid is still in effect.  Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested, however, that the freeze might continue in some form in a post on X: “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court's injunction. The President's EO's on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.” A separate executive action, still in effect, offers buyouts to over two million federal workers. 

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Loren Rodgers

DOL Releases Two Proposed Rules on the Valuation of ESOP Shares

January 23 update: The DOL removed the proposed rules from its website, so we have replaced the original links to them with links to the DOL PDFs hosted on our website.
 
January 20 update: The new Trump administration has put all pending regulations on hold, including the proposed rules on ESOP valuation discussed below. The second executive order signed by the President today states that all executive departments and agencies shall "immediately withdraw any rules that have been sent to the OFR [Office of the Federal Register] but not published in the Federal Register." The two proposed rules that affect ESOPs have both been released as public inspection documents but have not been published. The proposed rules could be withdrawn and rewritten, modified, or retained, but the executive order means that they may not advance "until a department or agency head appointed or designated by the President after noon on January 20, 2025, reviews and approves the rule." The executive order does offer an exception from the withdrawal, but only if the head of the Office and Management and Budget "deems [it] necessary to address emergency situations or other urgent circumstances." The NCEO will issue an analysis of the proposal in the coming days.
 

At 8:45 am Eastern time on January 16, the Federal Register released the public inspection versions of two proposed rules, both of which would affect the determination of the value of shares in ESOP transactions.  Both proposed rules are from the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) at the Department of Labor (DOL). (Original links below replaced with links to the DOL PDFs hosted on our site after the DOL took down the pages.)

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