This article is part of a series from the Center for American Progress exposing how the sweeping Project 2025 policy agenda would harm all Americans. This new authoritarian playbook, published by the Heritage Foundation, would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.
Overtime pay increases workers’ paychecks and helps protect their time for personal and family obligations. When workers aren’t eligible for overtime, employers can force them to work 60-to-70-hour workweeks without any extra pay.
While the Biden-Harris administration increased the salary threshold for eligibility to a very modest $43,888, the authoritarian playbook known as Project 2025 proposes decreasing access and giving employers more power to exclude their employees. Project 2025’s far-right vision of overtime eligibility and benefits is designed to confuse and disempower workers. It would put more power in the hands of employers to exploit employees, which is seemingly part of Project 2025’s larger goal: pad corporate bottom lines at the expense of workers.
Project 2025 allows employers to pick and choose time frames to measure work hours
What Project 2025 says: “Congress should provide flexibility to employers and employees to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks.”
What the research says: Providing employers with less clarity about their wage obligations introduces more opportunities for fraud, abuse, and even honest mistakes. Currently, overtime is calculated weekly, which allows workers to keep track of their time accurately over a shorter time frame and to have more consistent expectations for their schedule. But Project 2025 proposes allowing the employer to choose the time period, giving employees less control of and visibility into their own paychecks.
Overtime eligibility and access are already among the most common forms of wage theft and other violations of the law by employers. From 2013 to 2023, overtime violations accounted for 82 percent of back wages for Fair Labor Standards Act violations—which cover minimum wage, overtime, retaliation, and tip theft by employers. Most violators of these laws face minimal consequences. A system rife with abuse needs clearer guidance and more enforcement, not additional “flexibility” for employers to decide who gets overtime pay and when.
Project 2025 lets employers avoid time-and-a-half pay
What Project 2025 says: “[Congress should] allow employees in the private sector the ability to choose between receiving time-and-a-half pay or accumulating time-and-a-half paid time off.”
What the research says: The Pew Research Center finds that nearly half of American workers who have access to paid leave from their employment already take less time off from work than they’re eligible for. While stated reasons for this vary, survey respondents noted pressure to not leave their coworkers with more work, concerns about falling behind, and concerns about losing their job. Since access to paid leave is already most limited for the lowest-paid workers, workers who are eligible for overtime are currently less likely to be eligible for paid leave. And notably, lower-wage workers are disproportionately women and Black workers, who Pew finds to be more likely to describe workplace pressure as a reason for taking less leave.
Jenn Round, director of Rutgers University’s Beyond the Bill program, noted to PolitiFact, a fact-checking publication, that giving employers more power would mean that they could “never allow workers to use their banked PTO, effectively eliminating overtime pay.” Moreover, the idea of redefining the period during which overtime is accrued from one week to several weeks “effectively dismantles the standard workweek.”
Project 2025 explicitly prioritizes the corporate bottom line over workers
What Project 2025 says: “DOL [the Department of Labor] should maintain an overtime threshold that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).”
What the research says: Tying wage thresholds to regional variations in what businesses prefer to pay their workers is a long-standing conservative approach that codifies preexisting wage inequality. American workers’ wages have consistently been lowest in the South, originating in slavery. This has only been furthered by sharecropping, the development of a tipping system that shifts the burden of paying wages to customers rather than employers, ongoing discrimination, and low union density.
Jenn Round noted to PolitiFact that Project 2025 could be read as proposing different overtime thresholds in different parts of the country, and it’s not clear how many workers that would affect given that Project 2025 does not include details on which regions would be considered “low cost.” Notably, framing the South, in particular, as “low cost” is misleading; and the Economic Policy Institute debunks the premise of “lower-cost regions” as Project 2025’s justification for lower wages. Adjusting each state’s median annual wages for cost of living, workers in the South are still paid less than other workers.
Project 2025 contends that millions fewer workers should get overtime pay
What Project 2025 says: “The Trump-era threshold is high enough to capture most line workers in lower-cost regions.”
What the research says: The Trump administration’s overtime threshold was only $35,568 a year, or $684 per week. While Project 2025 does not provide a citation for its claim that this amount covers most line workers, analysis of American Community Survey data collected in 2022 shows that slightly less than half of Southern nonmanagerial workers earned below that threshold, excluding self-employed workers, members of the armed forces, and workers under 16. Wages, especially for those earning the least, have been rising at a pace exceeding inflation, indicating that while more recent data are not available, it is likely that the Trump-era threshold—which was not proposed to index to inflation—covers even fewer workers now than it did in 2021 and 2022.
It is important to note that the practice of excluding workers from overtime eligibility due to managerial status—including when that status is a misnomer—is commonly abused by employers, so defining employees as managerial or nonmanagerial is likely undercounting those who should be eligible for overtime. Researchers observed that between 2010 and 2018, there was a 485 percent increase in the use of a managerial title for positions just above the threshold for overtime eligibility, with job titles—such as “front desk manager” in lieu of “receptionist”—fraudulently providing cover for overtime eligibility exclusion. Moreover, the study found that worker power and legal enforcement helped create and enforce clearer standards for overtime eligibility: In states where laws protect fewer worker rights, strategic inflated titles were at least 53 percent more frequent.
An egregious and consistent example of this practice is that retail chains may give floor staff nominal promotions to “manager” with minimal managerial work involved. This has been a widespread practice at dollar store chains, where “managers” stock shelves, clean, and run cash registers for 60 to 80 hours a week without a meaningful raise from nonmanager positions that receive 40 hours a week plus overtime. This abuse has been repeatedly exposed by journalists and targeted for enforcement.
Conclusion
Providing employers with more power in an overtime system already rife with employer-side abuse may be the goal of Project 2025, but it would be extremely harmful for workers. This is just one example of how Project 2025 would create a system that dismantles the checks and balances designed to protect Americans and their livelihoods.
The author would like to thank Kyle Ross, Aurelia Glass, Colin Seeberger, and Will Ragland for their review and contributions.