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Grassroots Effort Underway to Block Fiduciary Regulation

Its efforts having fallen short in the courts, a trade group has launched a grassroots campaign to derail the Labor Department’s fiduciary regulation.

The National Association for Fixed Annuities (NAFA) says it has launched a White House grassroots campaign “…because we want the Administration to understand the disappointment and anxiety being felt by our membership, which thought President Trump would never allow such a far-reaching excessive regulation to get this far.” The organization says that more than 2,000 NAFA members have already written the White House, and that they “…anticipate hundreds more will be doing so in the weeks ahead.”

In a press release, NAFA expressed its gratitude to members of Congress who have urged the Labor Department to delay the fiduciary regulation, but said that the organization will appeal “directly to President Trump and Secretary Acosta to exercise their authority to stop any part of this Rule from going into effect before the DOL has completed its reexamination of the Rule as called for by the President’s own February 3rd memorandum.”

Last December, NAFA’s request for an injunction pending appeal was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That, in turn, was in response to an earlier request seeking a motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent the new rules from taking effect “until at least ten months (or as much as two years) following the final disposition of th[e] litigation,” and a motion seeking either an “expedited status conference” or “expedited relief” on NAFA’s renewed motion for a preliminary injunction. Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had earlier denied motions for summary judgment as well as a preliminary injunction barring the fiduciary regulation from taking effect.

“We have a little more than a month to stop this runaway train. NAFA is pulling out all the stops to try to prevent any part of this rule going live on June 9th.”