Category: Daily News

One Year In: Public Views of a Changing Public Health Landscape is a national poll by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab. The poll was conducted March 19 – April 1, 2026, among a probability-based, nationally representative sample of 2205 U.S. adults ages 18 and older, to better understand people’s views about the changing public health landscape one year into the new federal administration.

It was fielded online and via telephone (cell phone and landline) by SSRS, an independent research company. This survey is nationally representative of U.S. adults. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish, March 19 – April 1, 2026, among a sample of 2205 adults ages 18 or older in the United States. Republicans include adults who lean Republican, Democrats include adults who lean Democrat, and Independents includes adults who identify as “other” or are unaffiliated. The margin of error at the 95% confidence interval is +/- 2.0 percentage points.

For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was one of the most trusted institutions in American life. Trust in the CDC remained relatively stable in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, hovering around 75% from 2022 to 2025. These new national poll findings show concerning declines in the American public’s trust in federal health agencies one year into the new federal administration. One year into new leadership of the U.S. public health system, trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal health institutions has dropped dramatically. Only 50% of the public says they now trust health recommendations from the CDC, compared to 77% in spring 2025.

This decline in trust is driven by deep partisan divides. From 2025 to 2026, trust in CDC health recommendations has fallen from 92% to 34% among Democrats and from 77% to 47% among Independents, (92% to 34%) and 30 percentage points among Independents (77% to 47%), while trust among Republicans has increased very slightly from 63% to 67%.

The steep drop in public trust also translates to losses in trust across many demographic groups. Trust in the CDC has fallen more than 30 percentage points among women (80% to 48%); Black and Hispanic adults (77% to 43% and 81% to 50% respectively); those living in urban areas (80% to 48%); and those with a college degree (80% to 46%).

When examining public trust across prominent leaders and groups, the top trusted sources for health recommendations in 2026 are clinicians – nurses (89%), doctors (88%), and pharmacists (85%) – followed by friends and family (81%), nonprofit health and healthcare groups (79% – 80%), and researchers (78%).

State and local public health agencies are now substantially more trusted than the CDC. Trust in state and local public health agencies has also fallen in the last year, but not by as much. A majority of the public still trusts health recommendations from their local (70%) and state (66%) public health agencies.

A slim majority disapproves of federal public health agency actions in the past year, with a high level of concern about the influence of leaders’ personal beliefs, misplaced priorities, and budget cuts. With 55% public disapproval of federal health agencies’ actions in the past year, top concerns about their actions under new leadership include wide agreement that their recommendations have been influenced too much by leaders’ personal beliefs (68%), leaders are focused on the wrong priorities (66%), and programs have been cut or scaled back too much (61%).

Public support for routine childhood vaccination policies remains strong, though a substantial minority supports reductions to the routine vaccine schedule. More than three-quarters (77%) of the public – including majorities across party lines – say that parents should be required to vaccinate their children in order to attend school. A majority (58%) also oppose reducing the childhood vaccine schedule, which forms the basis of childhood vaccine requirements, but there is substantial minority support (42%) for this change.

Views of vaccine safety have dropped closer to pre-COVID-19 levels. As another indication that support for vaccines may be softening, the fraction of the public saying childhood vaccines are “very safe” has dipped from 63% in 2025 to 57% in 2026, trending back to pre-pandemic levels (54% in 2019) from a high of 70% during COVID-19 (2022).

A majority of the public supports federal changes to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, with higher support for individual recommendations on less sugar and more protein. Six in ten (60%) support the recent changes to the food pyramid and dietary guidelines, and even stronger majorities support specific measures, like recommendations to avoid or sharply limit sugar and highly-processed food (90%) and to increase protein intake (85%). A much smaller majority (62%) supports recommendations to increase beef and whole milk consumption.

Support is bipartisan for limiting sugar and highly-processed food (Republicans: 94%, Democrats: 89%) and for increasing protein intake (Republicans: 92%, Democrats: 79%).

However, there is more division when considering overall support for changes, with 83% of Republicans saying they support the overall changes, compared to only 37% of Democrats. Support for recommendations to increase beef and whole milk consumption is also divided, with 80% support among Republicans and 44% support among Democrats.

Kenneth Doss worked for Tesla, Inc. at the company’s Fremont distribution center, first as a materials handler and then as a “yard hostler.” Yard hostlers drive tractor trucks to move, position, and park 53-foot trailers around Tesla’s factory grounds. The trailers contained auto parts — including, by Doss’s account, battery parts shipped in from Nevada — that had arrived from out of state and would be unloaded into a warehouse and eventually used to assemble Tesla vehicles. Doss never crossed state lines or physically left the factory grounds; his job was to reposition the still-loaded trailers from the parking and docking area to the warehouse dock so the parts could be unloaded.

Doss filed a putative class action against Tesla in Alameda County Superior Court, alleging eight causes of action for wage-and-hour violations under the Labor Code and the Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”), covering unpaid wages, overtime, meal and rest periods, wage statements, final-pay timing, and business-expense reimbursement. When he was hired, Doss had electronically signed an offer letter containing an arbitration provision with both a class action waiver and a clause stripping the arbitrator of authority to consolidate employee claims or award class-wide relief. Tesla moved to compel individual arbitration.

The central legal question was whether the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) governed the agreement. The FAA exempts from its coverage the employment contracts of transportation workers “engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” (9 U.S.C. § 1). If that exemption applied, the FAA would not preempt California law that could defeat or limit arbitration.

The trial court denied Tesla’s motion to compel arbitration in its entirety. The court found that (1) the yard hostlers were transportation workers engaged in interstate commerce, so the arbitration agreement was exempt from the FAA under section 1 — reasoning that “the flow of commerce does not stop at the loading dock door”; (2) Labor Code section 229 (which lets courts disregard arbitration agreements in certain wage actions) rendered the agreement ineffective as to seven of Doss’s eight causes of action; (3) the class waiver was invalid under the four-factor test of Gentry v. Superior Court, 42 Cal. 4th 443 (2007); and (4) severance of the class waiver was inappropriate because the agreement was tainted with illegality.

The Court of Appeal issued a mixed disposition: affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded in the partially published case of Doss v. Tesla, Inc., No. A173210 (June, 2026). It affirmed the core holding that Doss and the putative class are exempt from the FAA under section 1. It reversed the trial court’s application of Labor Code section 229 to four of the causes of action, and it found legal error in the trial court’s severance analysis, remanding for the trial court to decide unconscionability issues it had not yet reached. The court affirmed the trial court’s Gentry ruling in the unpublished portion of the opinion.

The FAA section 1 exemption (affirmed — published). Reviewing the legal question de novo, the court held the yard hostlers are exempt “transportation workers.” Drawing on Circuit City Stores v. Adams, 532 U.S. 105 (2001), and Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, 596 U.S. 450 (2022), the court explained that the inquiry focuses on the actual work performed, that a worker need not be in the transportation industry (Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St., LLC, 601 U.S. 246 (2024)) and need not personally cross state lines. Saxon held that loading and unloading cargo from vehicles in interstate transit is activity within the flow of commerce; the Ninth Circuit extended that logic to a warehouse worker in Ortiz v. Randstad Inhouse Services, LLC, 95 F.4th 1152 (9th Cir. 2024). The court placed the yard hostlers along this continuum: because their handling of the trailers was “a necessary step” in completing the interstate journey of the auto parts, they fell within the exemption.

Labor Code section 229 (reversed in part — published). Section 229 applies only to actions “for the collection of due and unpaid wages” arising from Labor Code sections 200–244. Applying Lane v. Francis Capital Management LLC, 224 Cal. App. 4th 676 (2014), and Kirby v. Immoos Fire Protection, Inc., 53 Cal. 4th 1244 (2012), the court held that Doss’s second (overtime), third (meal periods), fourth (rest periods), and fifth (wage statements) causes of action are not collection-of-wages actions within section 229 — the second and third because they arise outside sections 200–244, and the fourth and fifth because their underlying legal violation is the denial of breaks or accurate statements, not the nonpayment of wages. The court rejected Doss’s argument that Naranjo v. Spectrum Security Services, Inc., 13 Cal. 5th 93 (2022), superseded Lane, reading Naranjo to reaffirm that characterization turns on the nature of the violation, not the remedy. But the court affirmed application of section 229 to the first (unpaid wages) and sixth (final pay under sections 201–203) causes of action, plus the derivative UCL claim — disagreeing with Lane to the extent it suggested a section 203 waiting-time-penalty claim falls outside section 229, and aligning with Villalobos v. Maersk, Inc., 114 Cal. App. 5th 1170 (2025).

The Gentry factors (affirmed — unpublished). Reviewing for abuse of discretion, the court upheld the finding that the class waiver was invalid. Counsel’s declaration adequately supported a modest individual recovery (~$25,000), consistent with figures accepted in Garrido v. Air Liquide Industrial U.S. LP, 241 Cal. App. 4th 833 (2015), and Betancourt v. Transportation Brokerage Specialists, Inc., 62 Cal. App. 5th 552 (2021). The court found the trial court could reasonably infer real-world obstacles to individual arbitration, and noted that not all four Gentry factors must point the same way to support invalidation.

Severance (reversed for legal error; remanded — unpublished). The court agreed with Tesla that the trial court’s refusal to sever was based on legal error. Under Ramirez v. Charter Communications, Inc., 16 Cal. 5th 478 (2024), severance is the strongly preferred course unless the agreement is “permeated” by unconscionability. The trial court wrongly treated the presence of a class waiver as itself evidence of a systematic effort to disadvantage employees, contrary to Gentry, which says severance is “particularly appropriate” for class-waiver provisions. Because Doss had argued other provisions were substantively unconscionable and the trial court never ruled on them, the appellate court remanded for the trial court to decide those unconscionability issues in the first instance.

Rebecca Orr worked briefly for United Parcel Service, Inc. (“UPS”) as a Seasonal Support Driver in late 2023, picking up packages from other UPS drivers and delivering them to their final destinations during the holiday rush. When she applied, she signed an “Arbitration Agreement/Seasonal Hiring Agreement” through an online portal. The agreement was drafted to be “as broad as legally permissible” and contained four provisions that mattered to her case: a Delegation Clause giving the arbitrator exclusive authority over disputes about the agreement’s validity and enforceability; a Class Action Waiver; a PAGA Individual Action Requirement Clause; and a “How This Agreement Applies” section declaring the contract governed by the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) — unless the FAA “does not apply to a particular dispute or to one or both parties.”

Orr’s experience on the job was rocky. Although UPS told her she would work eight-hour days, six days a week, her routes were shortened or canceled the morning of a scheduled shift on at least seven occasions. After a December route cancellation, she contacted HR and was told there were not enough packages to deliver. She received no further assignments despite repeated requests for work.

Orr sued UPS in the Superior Court of California for the County of Riverside, raising five state-law claims (including a claim that UPS failed to pay drivers their required “reporting time pay”) on behalf of three putative classes, later adding a sixth claim under California’s Private Attorneys General Act (“PAGA”). UPS removed the case to federal court and moved to compel arbitration and stay proceedings.

A central dispute emerged: Orr and UPS disagreed over whether the FAA or the California Arbitration Act (“CAA”) governed the agreement. The distinction was not merely academic — the two statutes differ in ways that could change which of Orr’s claims could be heard in court versus arbitration.

The district court granted UPS’s motion. It ordered Orr to arbitrate her individual claims “consistent with the terms of the binding arbitration agreement,” while staying litigation of the class claims pending arbitration. Critically, the court declined to decide whether the FAA or CAA applied, reasoning that the “result is the same” under either statute, so the question need not be resolved. It also concluded that Orr had forfeited any challenge to the Delegation Clause.

Orr moved for clarification under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(a) and (b), arguing the court itself had to decide whether her contract fell within the FAA’s exemption for certain employment contracts (9 U.S.C. § 1). The district court denied the motion, holding it had “properly refrained” from determining whether a Section 1 exemption applied because, in its view, the CAA does not require that analysis before compelling arbitration.

Because neither the FAA nor California law allows an ordinary appeal from an order granting arbitration, Orr sought a writ of mandamus from the Ninth Circuit.

This was a mandamus proceeding, not a conventional appeal, so the Ninth Circuit did not “affirm” or “reverse.” Instead, the panel granted Orr’s petition for a writ of mandamus and directed the district court to determine the appropriate statutory basis for its authority to compel arbitration in the published case of In re Rebecca Orr, No. 25-2330 (9th Cir. June 9, 2026). The court made clear it was not ordering that arbitration is improper — only that the legal basis for it must be decided first, with the remaining arbitrability issues left to the district court to address afterward.

The panel evaluated the five factors governing mandamus relief from Bauman v. U.S. District Court, 557 F.2d 650, 654–55 (9th Cir. 1977): (1) the absence of another adequate remedy such as direct appeal; (2) prejudice not correctable on appeal; (3) clear legal error by the district court; (4) an oft-repeated error or persistent disregard of the rules; and (5) a new and important problem or issue of first impression. The third factor — clear error — is a necessary condition, so the court began there.

Clear legal error (Factor 3). The court held the district court clearly erred by compelling arbitration without identifying the source of its authority, thereby improperly handing the FAA § 1 exemption question to the arbitrator. Under New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira, 586 U.S. 105, 111 (2019), a court — not an arbitrator — must decide whether the § 1 “contracts of employment” exclusion applies before ordering arbitration under the FAA, because a court’s power to compel arbitration is bounded, not “unconditional.”

Two features made the error especially clear here. First, the agreement’s own choice-of-law clause assumed the FAA would control unless found inapplicable, making the FAA question a contractual prerequisite. Second, the choice of governing law was not a mere technicality: under Perry v. Thomas, 482 U.S. 483, 490–91 (1987), the FAA preempts California Labor Code § 229 (which lets employees pursue unpaid-wage claims in court despite an arbitration agreement), but California courts allow such suits when only the CAA applies, Garrido v. Air Liquide Industries U.S. LP, 241 Cal. App. 4th 833, 845 (2015).

The panel rejected UPS’s argument that New Prime does not apply where state law offers an alternative basis for arbitration, noting that no federal court of appeals has allowed a district court to skip the § 1 question simply because a state statute might also compel arbitration. It pointed to its own precedents Romero v. Watkins & Shepard Trucking, Inc., 9 F.4th 1097, 1100 (9th Cir. 2021), and In re Van Dusen, 654 F.3d 838, 846 (9th Cir. 2011), as well as decisions from sister circuits, including Harper v. Amazon.com Services, Inc., 12 F.4th 287, 296 (3d Cir. 2021), and Cunningham v. Lyft, Inc., 17 F.4th 244, 253 (1st Cir. 2021).

With the first three factors — including the critical clear-error factor — strongly favoring relief, the panel granted the writ.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued an opinion on June 9 concluding that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s longstanding guidelines on disparate-impact liability under Title VII are unconstitutional. The opinion, signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joshua Craddock, asserts that the EEOC’s approach pressures employers into race-based decision-making to avoid liability—and that, properly read, Title VII reaches only practices reflecting “a significant likelihood of intentional discrimination.”

In an unusual move, DOJ announced the opinion jointly with the EEOC. OLC opinions are not court rulings, but they are treated as binding within the executive branch – meaning the EEOC and other agencies are now expected to enforce Title VII consistent with this reading.

Disparate-impact liability holds employers responsible for facially neutral practices that disproportionately burden a protected group, even absent discriminatory intent. Its origin is the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which held that Title VII bars practices “fair in form, but discriminatory in operation” – in that case, a high-school-diploma requirement and an aptitude test that screened out Black applicants without being shown to predict job performance.

In 1978, the EEOC, DOL, DOJ, and the Civil Service Commission jointly adopted the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (29 C.F.R. part 1607), which remain in force and require employers to “validate” any selection procedure producing an adverse impact. The Court refined the framework in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989), tightening the plaintiff’s burden to identify the specific practice causing a disparity. Congress responded in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, codifying the three-step burden-shifting test at 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(k): the plaintiff identifies a specific practice causing a disparity; the employer shows the practice is “job related” and “consistent with business necessity”; and the plaintiff may still prevail by identifying an equally effective, less-discriminatory alternative the employer refused to adopt.

Two later decisions – Ricci v. DeStefano (2009) and Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities (2015) – flagged the “serious constitutional questions” that arise if liability turns on statistical disparity alone, and emphasized that the doctrine needs limiting safeguards to avoid pushing employers toward quotas. Justice Scalia’s Ricci concurrence, that the “war between disparate impact and equal protection” would eventually be waged, is quoted prominently in the new opinion.

Rather than declaring the 1991 statute itself void, OLC deploys constitutional avoidance to reinterpret Title VII narrowly and then finds specific EEOC regulations unlawful. It lays out three limiting principles:

– –  1)  A low business-necessity bar. Employers need only show a challenged practice is “rational, convenient, or helpful” to a valid business purpose. Background checks, aptitude and knowledge tests, SAT scores, high-school-graduation requirements, and blind auditions are deemed presumptively job-related. Only “irrational or arbitrary” practices with no plausible job-relatedness can create liability.
– –  2)  A robust causation requirement. Plaintiffs must show – at the pleading stage and beyond – that the specific challenged practice itself, not external factors, caused the disparity.
– –  3)  A demanding alternative-practice requirement. Plaintiffs must identify a concrete alternative that is both less discriminatory and equally effective, including as to cost and other burdens.

Applying these principles, the opinion concludes that two parts of the EEOC’s framework are independently unlawful: the validation-study requirements in the Uniform Guidelines (which it calls atextual, “labyrinthine,” and improperly burden-shifting), and the Affirmative Action Guidelines (29 C.F.R. part 1608), which it says unconstitutionally encourage racial preferences without an established Title VII violation.

OLC frames the opinion as a response to the Supreme Court’s June 2 per curiam decision in Allen v. Milligan and its companion Louisiana v. Callais, which reread Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to impose liability “only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” OLC imports that logic into Title VII.

The opinion is also the latest step in a sequence that began with President Trump’s April 2025 Executive Order 14281, Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy, directing agencies to eliminate disparate-impact enforcement. That was followed by the EEOC pausing disparate-impact investigations in 2025 and DOJ’s December 2025 rule rescinding Title VI disparate-impact regulations. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, who formally requested the opinion in February, welcomed it as providing “clarity” on the constitutional limits of the doctrine; Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said it would let businesses “hire based on performance.”

Theoretical practical takeaways for employers and their counsel to consider at this early stage.

– –  Enforcement posture has shifted, but the statute has not. The 1991 codification of disparate impact remains on the books, and courts – not OLC – decide what Title VII requires. Plaintiffs can still sue in federal court, and the private bar has signaled it will continue bringing disparate-impact claims regardless of EEOC inaction.
– –  Expect agency charges to get harder to win. The EEOC is unlikely to pursue impact-only theories, and the validation and affirmative-action regulations are now treated as unenforceable within the agency.
– –  Selection tools are on firmer footing – at the federal level. Tests, background checks, and similar screens face a lighter justification standard under this reading. But state and local fair-employment laws (and their own disparate-impact provisions) are unaffected and remain a live source of exposure.
– –  DEI-style “voluntary affirmative action” carries fresh risk. The opinion’s hostility to race-conscious “goals and timetables” reinforces the post-SFFA, post-Ames trend against preference programs.

Critics, including former Civil Rights Division attorneys, argue the opinion contradicts Supreme Court precedent and will lead to “a sharp increase in unchecked discrimination.” Because an OLC opinion binds the executive branch but not the judiciary, the doctrine’s ultimate fate will turn on litigation now likely to accelerate – and, eventually, on whether the Supreme Court takes up the question Justice Scalia flagged sixteen years ago.

NOTE: This summary is for informational purposes and is not legal advice. Employers should consult counsel about how these developments interact with applicable federal, state, and local law.

Private self insurers are required to file Self Insurer’s Annual Reports by March 1 each year. Each private Self Insurer’s report is required to include paid, estimated future, and total incurred claims costs for each of the past five calendar years (claims reported from January 1 through December 31 for each year), as well as paid, estimated future, and total incurred claims costs for any claims still open from earlier reported years.

California private self-insured employers reported fewer workers’ compensation claims in 2025, driving private, self-insured claim frequency to a 5-year low, but initial data show signs of rising claim costs according to a new California Workers’ Compensation Institute (CWCI) analysis of first-report data from the state Office of Self-Insurance Plans (OSIP).

The latest data show private self-insured employers in California covered nearly 2.22 million employees in 2025, down 1.5% from the prior year. Despite the slight reduction in the covered workforce, private self-insured wages and salaries totaled nearly $152.5 billion, up 1.1% from the prior year. At the same time, the number of reported claims in the private self-insured sector fell for the third year in a row, declining 2.7% to 84,996 claims. That total is 18.5% below the 2022 peak, when thousands of COVID-19 cases pushed the private self-insured claim count up to 104,278.

Overall, private self-insured claim frequency edged down from 3.88 claims per 100 employees in 2024 to 3.83 claims per 100 employees last year, the lowest level since 2020. The Institute notes that both indemnity and medical-only claim frequency have fallen since the pandemic-era spike in COVID-related claims, with the decline in indemnity frequency contributing just slightly more to the overall reduction in private self-insured claim frequency.

Despite the declines in private self-insured claim volume and frequency, comparing the initial loss data from all 2024 and 2025 claims (medical-only and indemnity) show total paid losses remained essentially unchanged at $352.4 million. At the same time, total incurred losses (paid benefits plus reserves for future payments) rose 4.8% to $979.2 million, reflecting increases in expected claim costs, as the average incurred loss per claim increased 7.7% last year, driven largely by growth in medical reserves.

The Institute also found that both average paid and average incurred losses on private self-insured claims have been trending up for several years. Comparing first-report loss payments on all private self-insured claims from recent years, the Institute found that the average paid loss rose 2.5% to $4,147 in 2025, marking the third consecutive annual increase. Since bottoming out at $2,983 in 2022, the average paid loss has increased 39.0%. Meanwhile, the average incurred loss climbed to $11,520 last year, up 48.1% since 2022. Higher indemnity and medical losses both contributed to these increases, but rising medical losses have been the key cost driver, as the first report data from 2022 and 2025 show the average paid medical loss per claim increased 48.4% and the average incurred medical loss per claim increased 55.2%; so even with the 18.5% reduction in claim volume, total paid medical losses increased 20.9%; and total incurred medical losses increased 26.5%.

OSIP’s newly released data summary provides the first look at California private self-insured workers’ compensation experience for calendar year 2025 and includes updated experience for claims reported from 2021 through 2024. OSIP has posted its latest summary, along with those from the previous 24 years.