Washington is a town built on virtue signaling and hypocrisy. Recently, the biggest culprit was none other than the White House itself. President Biden said all the right things during Small Business Week, but his action on a key issue impacting millions of small businesses told a far different story.

With the president's May 3 veto of a bipartisan Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would have overturned the expansion of the joint employer rule, the Biden Administration showed that it cares more about special interests than small business owners, who face an onslaught of costs and uncertainties from the ceaseless regulatory assault. Incredibly, the presidential veto message included no mention of the looming harm to the franchise model, a stunning oversight of the small business community whose future hangs in the balance — as evidenced by a recent petition of more than 5,300 franchise stakeholders who appealed to the White House to sign the legislation.

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At issue is the expanded joint employer rule announced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last October. This rule threatens to upend the relationship between franchisors (brand companies such as McDonald's, Anytime Fitness or Dunkin') and the individual franchisees (the local small business owner who operates the establishment). Under the previous 2020 standard, a company could only be........

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