In today’s news and commentary, U.S. and Nippon Steel file lawsuits to revive their merger, a proposal for the EEOC to collect data on pay gaps faces headwinds under the Trump administration, and a second Texas judge rejects a DOL rule expanding overtime protections.

After President Biden blocked their merger last week (as Anjali noted on Friday), U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel are suing the U.S. government in an attempt to revive the deal. The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., accuses Biden of improperly using his national security powers. The companies filed separate suits against Cleveland-Cliffs, an American steel company that previously tried to buy U.S. Steel, and against the president of the United Steelworkers. The New York Times called the lawsuits a “long-shot maneuver.” The U.S. Steel-Nippon merger is the ninth foreign transaction to be blocked by a president since 1990, according to the Congressional Research Service. Seven of the nine occurred in the last decade.

A proposal by Democrats on the EEOC to require large businesses to annually submit pay data broken down by race, sex, ethnicity, and job category is unlikely to survive under the Trump Administration. In a few weeks, the commission will switch to a Republican chair, who is expected to bring a deregulatory agenda, although Democrats will maintain majority voting power at the commission due to staggered terms. The Biden administration had difficulty enacting the rule because of the staggered terms, which meant Democrats did not have a majority on the commission until July 2023. The administration added the pay disclosure proposal to its spring 2024 regulatory agenda, but likely counted on winning the election in November to enact the proposal, according to a former DOL official.

A second federal district court in Texas has rejected a DOL rule that would expand overtime protections to 4 million new workers. Judge Sam Cummings of the Northern District of Texas held last week that the rule went beyond the DOL’s authority under federal law. The decision comes after a judge in the Eastern District of Texas blocked the rule nationwide in November. The DOL has since appealed that ruling to the 5^th Circuit. The challenged rule, released in April, would raise the threshold for how much workers can earn while still being eligible for mandatory overtime and would override provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act that exempt certain white-collar workers from overtime requirements.