For thirty-four years, Tim Hauser devoted his career at the U.S. Department of Labor to protecting the interests of employee benefit plan participants and beneficiaries. From 2013 until his retirement in December 2025, Hauser was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Program Operations at the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA). In that role, he was responsible for the formulation and development of EBSA’s regulatory, enforcement, compliance assistance, education, and reporting policies and programs.

Hauser first joined the Department of Labor in 1991 as a trial attorney for the Plan Benefits Security Division (PBSD), where he represented EBSA and the Department in federal district court and appellate litigation. For more than a decade before he was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary, he served EBSA as the Associate Solicitor of PBSD, the office responsible for the Department’s legal work under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).

EBSA is responsible for the safety and security of the nation’s private retirement, health, and welfare benefit system, as well as for the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which provides retirement benefits to federal workers. ERISA-covered plans hold trillions of dollars in assets and cover more than 156 million workers, retirees, and their families. Both as a litigator and as EBSA’s chief career civil servant, Hauser was a direct participant in virtually every important issue the agency tackled under ERISA for more than three decades. As the agency’s attorney, he litigated and supervised a wide range of complex financial and health cases, wrote and edited numerous briefs, and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for plan participants. As deputy assistant secretary, he was a key policymaker and administrator for all EBSA’s important work.

Hauser’s work at the agency had a direct impact on a wide range of benefit topics, including core fiduciary obligations under ERISA, remedies, standing, preemption, “missing participants,” reporting and disclosure obligations, benefit claims administration, asset management, mental health parity, and the Affordable Care Act. He also oversaw a restructuring of the agency’s enforcement program to increase its beneficial impact on plan participants and beneficiaries, and he increased the agency’s focus on health cases and issues.

During Hauser’s years at EBSA, the agency successfully addressed a large number of regulatory and policy challenges, and its investigators and benefits advisors routinely recovered more than six times the agency’s entire budget for America’s workers. However, despite  the millions of people the agency helped, and the billions of dollars in recoveries EBSA obtained during his tenure, Hauser remains proudest of his work on the agency’s now abandoned effort to impose a fiduciary best interest standard on investment professionals who market themselves as providing individualized investment recommendations to retirement investors based on their best interests.  While these efforts directly contributed to the SEC’s adoption of a best interest standard for brokers, important work remains to ensure that advice to 401(k) plan participants meets a best interest standard, regardless of the product recommended. An interview with Mr. Hauser about the Department’s final 2024 rule, which was subsequently withdrawn by the Trump Administration, provides some insight into his thinking on this issue. Over the course of his career, he has also been a frequent speaker at numerous conferences sponsored by bar associations, practitioners, educational groups, and plan, health, and financial services companies and professionals.

Before joining the Department of Labor, Hauser worked as a trial attorney for six years at Legal Aid of Western Missouri, representing indigent clients in civil litigation in ten rural counties in Missouri. He graduated from the University of Illinois and from Harvard Law School.