Labor Secretary Alex Acosta. Photo: Robert Sullivan/AFP/Getty Images

The Trump administration is changing labor law so as to allow restaurants to control their employee tip pool. When you’re enacting a regulatory change like this, you have to follow procedures, which include an analysis of its effects. The analysis showed that the thing anybody could guess would happen when you let the boss control the tip pool would happen: The employees would get a lot less of it. In this case, waiters, waitresses, and dishwashers would lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars.

What happened next? If your guess is, the Trump administration decided not to implement this change because it doesn’t want to steal from working-class people, you probably haven’t been following the Republican Party very closely for the last few decades. No, the real response was to omit the analysis.

Budget Director Mick Mulvaney sided with Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to keep the study of the effects of this change on workers out of the rulemaking process. This, reports Bloomberg Law, “allowed the department to delete from the proposal internal estimates showing businesses could take hundreds of millions in gratuities from their workers.”

If you coastal elites don’t like it, sorry — the white working class in the Midwest wanted restaurant owners to be able to steal their workers’ tips, and that’s why the voted for Trump.