Twice a year the government publishes a list of the rules it intends to write. It is called the Unified Agenda, it is dry by design, and it is where a great deal of consequential policy first appears, months before a headline. The edition submitted to the White House budget office on July 4 contains two items worth reading before the comment windows open [3].
The first is a Labor Department rule on child labor. Its official abstract, on the government's reginfo.gov, states that 'the Department is considering a notice of proposed rulemaking to amend certain child labor regulatory standards under the FLSA relating to permissible hours of work 14- and 15-year-olds' [1]. The Fair Labor Standards Act's limits on how many hours those ages may work, and when, are the guardrail the rule would loosen. A proposed rule is slated for September [1]. The abstract does not yet specify how the hours would change - which is itself a reason to watch the docket.
The second is at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and it removes a measurement. The agency is preparing to rescind the EEO-1 report - the annual filing in which employers report their workforce by race, ethnicity and sex - along with the related EEO-2 through EEO-5 reports [2]. The EEOC's stated reason: the collection 'was not mandated by statute, but was an agency-created requirement, which imposed a significant financial and administrative burden on America's employers, including thousands of small businesses' [2]. That is true as far as it goes. What the burden buys is the data. The EEO-1 is the demographic snapshot that regulators, researchers and courts use to detect discrimination across the workforce; end the filing and the disparities do not disappear, only the ability to see them at scale.
They travel with company. The same agenda carries a tip-credit rule and a series of EEOC guidance rescissions - on disparate impact and national origin, on 1979 affirmative-action guidelines, on sex-discrimination standards [2]. Read together, the items sketch a direction: fewer limits on hours, less collected data, thinner guidance on bias.
None of this is final. These are planned proposals, each of which must still be written, published and opened for comment, and the child-labor item has not even specified its terms [1][2]. That is precisely why the agenda is worth reading at the agenda stage. The decisions have not been made; they have been scheduled. The record of what is coming is public now, on a government website, for anyone who opens it before the notice-and-comment clock starts.
