Daniel Aronowitz, has been nominated by President Trump to serve as Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA). The oversight provided by the ESBA is critical to the safety of retirement savings and employee welfare plans, including health care. If confirmed, his responsibilities will include safeguarding the $14 trillion in private sector pension and welfare plans that benefit 156 million workers, retirees and family members.
The EBSA enforces the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a federal law protecting participants' rights in private-sector retirement and health plans. ERISA oversees approximately 2.6 million health plans, 801,000 private pension plans and 514,000 other workplace welfare benefit plans.
If confirmed, he would serve under the secretary of labor. The nominee for labor secretary, Lori M. Chavez-DeRemer, testified at her confirmation hearing on February 19 and will face a vote in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee when they consider her nomination on February 27.
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Who is Daniel Aronowitz?
Aronowitz has spent most of his career focused on representing plan administrators in the context of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). He currently serves as president of ENCORE Fiduciary, an insurer specializing in ERISA fiduciary liability insurance. As head of the ESBA, he would be responsible for protecting employer-based retirement, health, and welfare benefits for workers and retirees of the private and public sectors.
He is a graduate of The Ohio State University and Vanderbilt University School of Law and has achieved the RPLU+ designation from the Professional Liability Underwriting Society.
Lisa Gomez, the outgoing head of the EBSA, said in an interview that she’s happy that the person nominated to replace her is familiar with ERISA plans and understands the challenges plan fiduciaries face, Pension and Investments reported.
Critic of growing plaintiff class action litigation against plan administrators
Aronowitz is a regular critic of plaintiffs’ attorneys suing plan administrators in posts on his The Fid Guru Blog. According to Bloomberg Law, "the number of class actions charging employers with violating strict fiduciary conduct standards under federal benefits law has snowballed over the last decade, reaching an all-time post-pandemic high in 2020 and remaining elevated ever since."
In a December 10, 2024 post titled, Rebuttal to the American Association for Justice’s Supreme Court Amicus Brief Extolling the Virtue of Private ERISA Litigation he wrote, "The plaintiffs’ bar is nevertheless manufacturing fiduciary-breach cases in a business model designed to enrich lawyers, not plan participants, turning these plans into liability traps. ERISA’s fiduciary process standard has been turned into a performance standard in which plaintiff lawyers have become the judge and jury."
He devoted his most recent post outlining why the judgment against American Airlines for a breach of their duty of loyalty for failing to stop their investment manager (BlackRock) from voting for dissident directors in a 2021 Exxon proxy vote, was "unprecedented." He said in his first of four points criticizing the decision that "the decision is wrong on the law and must be reversed on appeal" and that the decision "is a political statement against the evil of ESG, with conscientious American Airlines fiduciaries caught as collateral damage."
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