John T. Dunlop’s swearing in as President Gerald Ford’s new Secretary of Labor featured all of the trappings of a celebration. The ceremony, held on March 18, 1975, in the East Room of the White House, was packed with representatives from seemingly every labor union, a tribute to Dunlop's close ties to labor and his lengthy career as a mediator and problem solver. Yet Dunlop used the occasion to issue a stern warning on an unlikely topic: the dangers of overregulation. In his remarks, Dunlop pointed out that the Department of Labor at that time had 134 major statutes or regulations to oversee, up from just 16 in 1940.
