Dear Rebecca:

Remember when I told you that the Trump Administration wants to let employers take the tips left for their employees? Lot of our readers got angry at that.

They’re going to be angrier:

Labor Department leadership scrubbed an unfavorable internal analysis from a new tip pooling proposal, shielding the public from estimates that potentially billions of dollars in gratuities could be transferred from workers to their employers, four current and former DOL sources tell Bloomberg Law.

Senior department political officials, after viewing an annual projection that billions of dollars in tips could transfer to businesses as a result of the proposal, ordered staff to revise the data methodology to lessen the expected impact, several of the sources said. Successive calculations showed progressively reduced values, but Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and his team are said to have still been uncomfortable with including the data in the eventual proposal. The officials disagreed with assumptions in the analysis that employers would retain their employees’ gratuities, rather than redistribute the money to other hourly workers. They wound up receiving approval from the White House to publish a proposal Dec. 5 that removed the economic transfer data altogether, the sources said.

I try to resist painting ideological rival as stock villains.

But hiding information about the likely effects of your actions … that’s not honest, is it?

What a horrible presidency we’re living through.

— Joel