The U.S. Department of Labor's building in Washington. Photo by Mike Scarcella/ALM
President Donald Trump has nominated Daniel Aronowitz, a longtime labor lawyer and labor law blogger, to be the assistant secretary of Labor and the next administrator of the Employee Benefits Security Administration.
EBSA oversees activities related to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, including administration of 401(k) plans and self-insured employer health plans.
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EBSA also works with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Internal Revenue Service to implement, interpret and enforce federal laws such as the Affordable Care Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
The Aronowitz nomination must be confirmed by the Senate.
The previous EBSA administrator was Lisa Gomez.
Related: Trump's Labor secretary pick led employer health plan data access bill, as House member
Trump has nominated Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former Republican House member from Oregon, to be the Labor secretary. Aronowitz would be one of Chavez-DeRemer's assisant secretaries.
The resume: Aronowitz is now the president of Encore Fiduciary, a firm that sells benefit plan sponsors fiduciary liability insurance and related products and services.
From 2005 through 2011, he was president of an Ullico property and casualty insurance division.
Earlier, he worked as a labor lawyer at law firms.
Aronowitz has a bachelor's degree in political science from The Ohio State University, where he received the university's outstanding senior award. He earned a law degree from Vanderbilt.
He holds active insurance agent or insurance consultant licenses in Connecticut, Ohio and Texas.
He has first-hand experience with one issue that could come up in EBSA rulemaking activities: the needs of workers who serve as living organ donors. In 2011, he donated one of his kidneys to his mother-in-law.
The writing: Aronowitz writes regularly for an Encore fiduciary law blog.
As a blogger, Aronowitz has been a critic of plaintiffs' lawyers' wave of suits against ERISA plan fees. He asked in one blog article, "Why does the Department of Labor Allow ERISA Regulation Through Litigation by Plaintiff Lawyers?"
He has also objected to suits against employer plans based solely on grounds related to equity, social and governance concerns.
In other articles, he has objected to suits filed against BlackRock over use of its LifePath target-date funds in retirement plans.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
