Yet Wage and Hour, like a lot of enforcement agencies, used to spend most of its resources on following up on complaints that came in—a very reactive mode. One of the fundamental notions we really changed in the agency was saying that if you don’t move to a much more proactive stance, if you don’t figure out where the problems are, and allocate your enforcement tools towards those, and then if you don’t use the full complement of enforcement tools the law gives you, which we were not historically, it’s going to be virtually impossible to have any impact on the prevalence of compliance.

The whole notion of strategic enforcement is that you have to be much more proactive in focusing enforcement activity on certain industries and employers. It’s relatively easy to articulate, but organizationally, changing the way an agency works is a difficult thing to do. But I think we were able to really move in that direction. Historically, only about 25 percent of investigations were proactive, directed investigations. By the end of my time there, 50 percent of investigations were directed.

Semuels: Do you think this strategy or other initiatives from the Obama Department of Labor will still be used in the new administration?

Weil: I was gravely worried about that with the first nominee [Andrew Puzder], who was, on the record, hostile to the basic mission of the Department of Labor. He was outspokenly against minimum wage and overtime, the basic notions of them, and those two particular programs reside in the Wage and Hour division. His own pattern of behavior with his company—all of that made me very, very, deeply concerned about what would happen had he been confirmed, so I was certainly delighted for a variety of reasons when he withdrew.

I remain concerned. I think we have to see what this next chapter brings. Alexander Acosta has given his life to public service, and the vetting will allow us to see what his policies look like, and what his priorities are.

Semuels: What are some of the ways the Department of Labor could change under President Trump?

Weil: We have to see what the Trump budget looks like—what will they be allocating to the whole range of programs in the Department of Labor? What is the message that's going to be sent about how serious they are about that?

It is not clear yet what this administration really means to do for the forgotten worker that Trump as a candidate talked endlessly about. Certainly the signal they sent for the first nominee was: Not much.

It’s a new chapter, though. Lets see what other signals come out of the White House—what are they doing with the overtime rule, for example? That’s going to be an incredible measure of how serious they are. If you want to say what rules really affect the kind of workers that people talk a lot about as explanations for why Trump won, I would say a lot of those workers are the kind who are going to be helped by the overtime rule we put in place. You look at a number of other rules we put into place, and the proof is in how robustly they enforce those rules.