AUGUST 2025 | 37 THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff. these two types of challenges, Wirtz was not on point.23 The court next ruled out the major questions doctrine, which is triggered by one of three things: economic significance, great political significance or intrusion upon the domain of state law. The major questions doctrine requires that agencies, given the principles of separation of powers and legislative intent, point to “clear congressional authorization” when addressing questions of “vast economic and political significance.”24 First, the court found that most cases applying the doctrine of “economic significance” “involved hundreds of billions of dollars of impact.”25 The impact of the 2019 Minimum Salary Rule was only around “$472 million in the first year.”26 Neither did the court find that the rule regulated a significant portion of the American economy – only 1.2 million workers were removed from the FLSA exemption by the new proposed minimum salary, a “small percentage of the overall workforce.”27 The court noted that “whether to use salary level to determine which employees should be exempt from various FLSA protections is not in line with the type of issues that have been considered politically contentious enough to trigger the doctrine.”28 Additionally, this power is not newly found by the DOL. It has been the one that has promulgated this type of regulation for decades. The court points out that the “DOL asserts an authority it has asserted continuously since 1938.”29 The court opined in dicta, “A particular minimum-salary rule could raise issues because of its size.”30 This is interesting given that, at the time of this ruling, the DOL was considering a proposed Minimum Salary Rule that would increase the minimum salary roughly 55% from the 2019 Minimum Salary Rule.31 However, the court went on to explain that Mr. Mayfield’s argument was that any consideration of salary in defining and delimiting the exemption was improper because it was beyond the agency’s authority. The court thus determined that the major questions doctrine did not apply. DOL Statutory Authority The court next looked at whether the 2019 Minimum Salary Rule exceeded the DOL’s statutory authority. Quoting Loper Bright, the court noted, “‘Courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment,’ even in agency cases.”32 The court must “independently identify and respect [constitutional] delegations of authority, police the outer statutory boundaries of those delegations, and ensure that agencies exercise their discretion consistent with the APA.”33 Congress explicitly delegated to the secretary of the DOL the authority to define and delimit the terms of the FLSA exemption.34 Thus, the court needed to determine whether the rule fell within the “outer boundaries of that delegation.”35 The court set out to do this by determining what the terms “define and delimit” included in the delegation meant and whether the rule could be squared with that delegation. Mayfield asserted that the power to “define and delimit” the terms of the exemption only allowed the agency to further specify duties that qualify an employee for the exemption (i.e., what duties qualify an employee as being an executive, administrator or professional).36 Mayfield highlights that some exemptions are defined in terms of duties, and others reference salary level, noting that Congress included a salary requirement when it wanted one.37 The court pointed out, however, that the question here is not “whether the Exemption’s terms should be interpreted to contain a salary requirement” but rather “whether the power conferred by the explicit delegation to ‘define[ ] and delimit[ ]’ the terms of the statute allows DOL to impose a salary requirement.”38 The DOL argued, and the court agreed, that using salary level was a permissible criterion for EAP status. The terms in the exemption “connote a particular status or level for which salary may be a reasonable proxy.”39 Moreover, “distinctions based on salary level are also consistent with the FLSA’s broader structure, which sets out a series of salary protections for workers that common sense indicates are unnecessary for highly paid employees.”40 Interestingly, the court in dicta stated, “Adding an additional characteristic is consistent with the power to define and delimit, but that power is not unbounded.”41 It further explained that a characteristic that differed so broadly in scope from the original that it effectively replaced it would raise serious questions.42 A proxy may not yield different results than the characteristic Congress originally chose because that proxy would be replacing the terms, as opposed to defining and delimiting them. This dicta would become the foundation for Texas v. Department of Labor or “Plano,”43 which would strike down the new rule that increased minimum salary level on a rolling basis.44 The 5th Circuit may have been communicating
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