Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

The results are in: attorneys are filing more employment law cases in court.  Indeed, year-end reporting from legal databases like LexMachina confirm that the pace of filing new employment discrimination cases reached its highest level in 2025, surpassing 20,000 new filings nationwide.  Though overtime and minimum wage lawsuits under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have continued to decline since 2015, discrimination cases under laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise.

The federal compliance landscape is in flux. In a closely watched leadership transition, Catherine Eschbach is leaving her role as Director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) to become Principal Deputy General Counsel at the EEOC. Starting Monday, Ashley Romanias will take the helm at OFCCP.

On September 18, 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency will be prioritizing the review of new chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) that are intended for use in data center projects, including the infrastructure that powers data centers, or for the manufacturing of covered components, as defined by Executive Order (EO) 14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure.” This prioritization of reviews will start with submissions received on or after September 29, 2025, and could accelerate time to market for chemistries supporting the expansion of US data center capacity. 

On April 15, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order, Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement, aimed at streamlining federal procurement. The Executive Order called for reforming the Federal Acquisition Regulation (“FAR”), the regulations that form the structure of most of the $1.5 trillion the federal government spends on contracts annually.