Borzi Confirmed as Labor Department’s Top Benefits Regulator

Longtime former congressional pension and health care staff member Phyllis C. Borzi has been confirmed as the Labor Department’s top benefits regulator.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Borzi as assistant secretary of labor of the Employee Benefits Security Administration without objection on Friday, July 10.

President Barack Obama nominated Borzi, who served 16 years as a pension and a benefits counsel for the House Education and Labor Committee’s labor-management relations subcommittee, for the Labor Department post in March.

In her former position as a staffer for Democratic committee members, she was involved in drafting several pension and health care measures, including one Congress passed in 1996 that makes it more difficult for employers to deny coverage for new employees’ pre-existing medical conditions.

Borzi is widely known for her pro-organized labor positions.

In 1993, she served on several working groups that were part of a presidential task force chaired by then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton that put together a comprehensive health care reform package that Congress later rejected.

Borzi, a one-time high school English teacher, left Capitol Hill in 1995 after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and joined the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington as a research professor. She also was of counsel at Washington law firm O’Donoghue & O’Donoghue.