It can be difficult to keep track of the casualties of the second Trump administration’s war on the federal bureaucracy and the thousands of federal government layoffs set in motion by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
One overlooked target is the Labor Department agency that oversees millions of retirement and health plans and that, supporters say, has an outsized impact on the financial security of American workers. The Employee Benefits Security Administration is charged with monitoring $12 trillion in retirement assets and 2.8 million health plans that cover more than 150 million workers and retirees nationwide. But since 2024, the number of staff at the agency has plummeted by more than 26%, according to federal data.
The Trump administration has taken particular aim at the agency’s investigative staff, who recover hundreds of millions of dollars annually for employees and conduct investigations into plan sponsors — work that researchers and labor-side attorneys say helps keep the industry honest.
The agency’s most recent annual report is filled with stories of individuals benefiting from these probes, including the restoration of $33.6 million in retirement benefits for 1,500 workers left with frozen 401(k)s after their company shuttered. But the scope of EBSA’s impact is bigger than these individual stories, say former employees.
Employees who have left the agency fear that drastic staff cuts are leaving workers less protected and that the agency’s new head, Daniel Aronowitz, is setting policy to serve the interests of an industry he once represented.
“I reached a point where I felt I could no longer accomplish what I think needs to be accomplished,” said Timothy Hauser, who was the highest-ranking career staffer at the agency when he retired last year after nearly 35 years at the Labor Department. He described what has happened to the agency during President Donald Trump’s second term as “tragic.”
New political leadership coming to the agency from industry is nothing new, said Hauser. But, in the past, both Democratic and Republican administrations were generally aligned on how to protect beneficiaries, even if policy specifics and tone would vary, he said.
What’s new is that this time, they want to “make it harder for people to bring even legitimate claims against plan fiduciaries,” he told Capital & Main.
EBSA declined to comment on this story and referred Capital & Main instead to policy guidance outlining the agency’s new priorities.
In fiscal year 2025, EBSA, which has fewer than 1,000 employees, recovered $1.4 billion owed to American workers — a number more than seven times the agency’s budget — through enforcement actions and informal complaint resolutions, according to agency records. The millions of people in the private benefit system “are all operating under the implicit sense that there is a government regulator looking out for them and making sure the system runs properly,” said Ali Khawar, who served as EBSA’s acting assistant secretary under President Joe Biden. ”We’re moving further and further away from that actually being a reality,” he said.
EBSA arose from a push for the Labor Department to better oversee employers’ retirement plans, as the 1960s and 1970s saw pension abuses that left many workers without the benefits promised to them.
Soon, however, employers began to move from offering pensions — through which the employer bears investment risk — to 401(k)s, which shifted that risk onto employees.
Throughout this shift, EBSA has been tasked with enforcing the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, commonly known as ERISA, which established fiduciary standards intended to protect workers and their benefits.
In fiscal year 2025, enforcement staff closed 878 civil investigations, recovering more than $714 million, as well as 253 criminal investigations, typically referred for prosecution.
During the Obama administration, Khawar said, there were more than 400 investigators on staff at EBSA.
But according to former staff, including Khawar, the agency has seen a 40% decrease in investigative staff since the new administration took over. Reporting from Bloomberg Law found that the agency employed 314 workers in investigative and enforcement roles as of February.
Last September, the Senate confirmed Aronowitz to head EBSA as assistant secretary of labor. At the time, Aronowitz was president of Encore Fiduciary, a company he founded, which provides insurance to employee benefit plan sponsors. His Labor Department bio describes him as an “advocate for sponsors of employee benefit plans.”
As part of his previous work, Aronowitz was critical of litigation against plan sponsors brought by EBSA, or more commonly, attorneys in the private sector, sometimes coordinating with the agency. Aronowitz referred to the trial bar as the “ERISA police” in a 2024 podcast produced by fiduciary services firm CAPTRUST, and said that plan sponsors “deserve to have the discretion to make judgments and not be second-guessed on unfair claims.”
The Biden administration expanded fiduciary duties in 2024 with the goal of better protecting investors, but the rule was blocked by federal judges in Texas and the new administration declined to defend it in November 2025.
“We will no longer be second-guessing the prudent discretionary judgement of fiduciaries,” Aronowitz said in a statement following the release of an April Labor Department bulletin outlining new priorities, many of which reflect the lobbying interests of the fiduciary services industry.
The April guidance took aim at the agency’s previous enforcement actions, stating that “EBSA must not regulate through enforcement activities” and required that Aronowitz review any enforcement actions.
The bulletin also stated that EBSA was to eliminate “any appearance” of coordination with plaintiff lawyers.
Investigations are “the lifeblood of EBSA’s mission,” said Jeff Hahn, a lawyer at the firm Stris & Maher who previously litigated agency cases as part of the Labor Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. Hahn left federal service in February 2025, following DOGE workforce changes.
EBSA investigations may not only lead to recoveries for plaintiffs — they can also “lead to broader industry change, even if it’s just one or [two] cases,” Hahn said.
Researchers also credit private litigation, like the sort championed by class action attorney Jerry Schlichter in the early 2000s, for driving down the fees that Americans pay benefit plan sponsors.
Although ERISA, passed in 1974, gave the workers the right to sue plan sponsors, Schlichter, founding and co-managing partner of Schlichter Bogard, said the Labor Department “never brought a single case” alleging plan sponsors charged excessive fees in the law’s first 30 years when he began creating “a whole [new] field of litigation.”
He pursued what he called “bet the farm” cases against some of the biggest U.S. companies, which marshaled “massive resources against us.”
Between 2015 and 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of plan participants in three of his firm’s major ERISA cases.
“It really took the pressure of these lawsuits to get the industry as a whole to do what they should have been doing all along, [which] shows the importance of enforcement,” said Nari Rhee, director of the Retirement Security Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Because insurance plans don’t operate in a conventional market — employees are generally limited to plans chosen by their employers — price competition is weaker. Lawsuits, however, can act as a substitute for market pressure, Rhee said. Fees have fallen dramatically since the early 2000s, when the first excessive fees cases were brought, she added.
According to Rhee’s research, average private sector plan fees fell by roughly two-thirds between 2000 and 2024, and even a fraction of a percentage point decrease in annual fees can amount to tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime retirement savings.
The Labor Department “depends on private litigation because they don’t have the staff to bring these cases,” said Schlichter. The solicitor general may file supportive briefs in such lawsuits, demonstrating how private litigation is one piece of EBSA’s enforcement strategy.
That practice, however, has changed under the new administration.
Rather than filing briefs in support of workers, EBSA has filed several briefs on the side of defendants — employers and plan sponsors.
Critics say that EBSA has operated inefficiently for years, pointing to the fact that since 2014 — when the agency closed more than 4,000 cases — the number of investigations completed each year has fallen precipitously.
But according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report, the smaller case load was a calculated decision on the part of an agency whose staffing levels had already been declining before the sweeping DOGE cuts. Working with few budgetary resources, EBSA began targeting cases that affected the most people, even though these cases were more complicated. The result was that over time, fewer cases were closed, but monetary recoveries greatly increased.
“We spent a lot of money on creating enforcement algorithms that enabled us to better target potential violations,” said Phyllis Borzi, who headed the agency during both of President Barack Obama’s terms.
Now, with EBSA having even fewer resources, and fewer staff, advocates and former staffers are worried about the future of the agency and the trillions of dollars in workers’ assets on the line.
Hauser said he’s confident that “the people who are still there will continue to try to do the best they can with what little they have. But at some point, that’s just a drop in an enormous ocean.”
