More than 15 years after the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was signed into law, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) chose to evaluate and revise regulations that it had promulgated in 1995 during President Clinton’s Administration. For much of that period, employers and their Washington, D.C. representatives pressed the case that substantial burdens had been added to the process of leave administration under the FMLA by the DOL rules. Almost from the day that Republican President George W.

Bush came into office in 2001, employer hopes grew that some of the more challenging aspects of the DOL regulations would be revised in a manner that would relieve those obligations and constraints. More than seven years later, the Bush Administration proposed revised FMLA rules that promised to provide a variety of changes, while leaving relatively untouched several problematic aspects of the agency’s regulations (such as the sometimes diffi cult challenges posed by the use of intermittent leave by employees without prior notice). The revisions that now have been issued are fi nal, to be effective, as noted above, on January 16, 2009.

Revision of the agency’s FMLA rules effectively were compelled by two developments: (1) decisions of the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, striking down or seriously questioning certain aspects of the current regulations; and (2) the addition of family military leave provisions to the FMLA. That latter was the result of H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law by President Bush in January 2008. Those factors, together with voluminous information and commentary obtained by the Department through a 2006-07 “Request for Information” process, led to 200 pages of revised FMLA regulations.1 In addition to the revised regulations, the DOL included a lengthy Preamble summarizing the large number of public comments (nearly 5,000) received by the agency.



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