The President’s choice of a former Obama administration official to serve as the top policy director at the Department of Labor signals the advent of a progressive regulatory agenda.
Currently serving as a Senior Advisor, Rajesh Nayak was nominated by Biden on April 23 to serve as Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Labor, where, if confirmed, he would help develop and advance policymaking priorities of the Biden administration’s DOL, including regulatory rulemaking efforts. 
One apparent area of interest to Nayak is modernizing the regulatory rulemaking process and pushing for more progressive regulation. In an April 2020 report, “OIRA 2.0: How Regulatory Review Can Help Respond to Existential Threats” for the Great Democracy Initiative that Nayak coauthored with Todd Tucker of the Roosevelt Institute, and in a follow-up piece in The American Prospect, the pair argue that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) should be reformed to “help address existential threats,” and its version of cost-benefit analysis modernized “to support progressive structure change and center equity.”
Among other things, Nayak and Tucker propose the creation of a Regulatory Planning Office within OIRA that would serve as a think tank within government to identify areas of under-regulation and help play a forward-looking role pressing agencies to pursue more effective agendas and “arming them with important tools to achieve those goals.”
“In other words, we see a revamped OIRA as a potential industrial planning facilitator—something the American state sorely lacks,” they write in The American Prospect. “This absence puts us at a significant disadvantage relative to our economic competitors when it comes to enacting bold transformational industrial policy of the kind needed to respond to pandemics, soaring inequality, and climate change.” The pair go on to note that it’s unlikely a Biden administration would give up centralized control over rulemaking or abandon an established process for justifying important rules, but suggest that it would be a “lost opportunity” not to modernize the OIRA.
Nayak previously spent seven years at the DOL during the Obama administration, serving in a range of senior roles including senior counsel and deputy assistant secretary for policy. Later, as deputy chief of staff, Nayak advised then-Secretary of Labor Tom Perez on the department’s workforce development, worker protection and counter-trafficking programs, and led the Department’s employee engagement efforts.
After his stint in the Obama administration, Nayak spent three years as the Deputy Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and most recently as a Fellow at the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and a consultant.
Prior to his government service, Nayak worked as an attorney at NELP, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and the Shriver Center in Chicago. He earned an undergraduate degree in public policy from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Yale.
Meanwhile, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is the only Labor nominee to be confirmed so far, while Julie Su still awaits Senate confirmation as Deputy Secretary of Labor. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted April 21 to advance her nomination in a 13-9 vote.
