Officials at EBSA's Office of Regulations and Interpretations will help EBSA take in requests for information letters and advisory opinions.

Information letters show how EBSA officials interpret laws that affect employee benefits.

Advisory opinions show how EBSA officials apply the laws to specific situations. "By addressing real-world questions, they promote clarity, consistency, and transparency in the application of federal labor standards," officials said.

The new advice effort: EBSA is announcing an effort to answer more questions as part of a broader Labor Department initiative to give more advice to the public.

The other department divisions involved in the initiative are the Wage and Hour Division, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Veterans' Employment and Training Service and the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The history: In recent decades, Republican administrations have generally seen giving specific advice to employers, benefits advisors and others as a way to improve compliance.

Democratic administrations have feared that people will bad intentions will use specific advice to find loopholes and avoid providing workers with good, honestly administered benefits.

As a result, "under Republican administrations, opinion letters have been prevalent," according to a commentary by Eric Meyer of Pierson Ferdinand. "Under Democratic administrations, the program has often been reduced or paused."

When Joe Biden was president, his EBSA team issued some advisory opinions, but it also rescinded some of the advisory opinions that EBSA issued during Trump's first term in the White House, Meyer said.

But EBSA is part of the "tri-agency" team of agencies that oversees implementation of the Affordable Care Act, along with the Internal Revenue Service and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the agencies in the tri-agency team have used answers to frequently asked questions to address some benefits questions.

Related: Trump's health benefits team picks: The early reviews

In 2024, for example, the IRS used a private letter ruling to approve a request by a Willis Towers Watson client to set up a program that would let employees allocate employer contributions to one of four different arrangements, including an HSA, a retiree health reimbursement arrangement, a student loan reimbursement arrangement and a defined contribution retirement plan.

Daniel Aronowitz: For the new EBSA question-answering effort, one important factor may be the fact that the nominee to be the new assistant Labor secretary in charge of EBSA is Daniel Aronowitz, a longtime lawyer who has been an insurance company president, the founder and head of a firm that helps benefit plan fiduciaries with risk management issues and a frequent blogger about labor law issues.

Given Aronowitz's years of experience with blogging about benefits law questions, it's possible that EBSA could take an especially active approach to answering benefits law questions going forward.

The future: The benefits law team at Fisher Phillips recommended that employers interested in getting EBSA advisory opinions work with experienced lawyers.

The letters "can offer valuable clarity in gray areas," according to the Fisher Phillips team.

But the opinion letters can't override clear statutory or regulatory mandates, and "they may be withdrawn or revised under future administrations," the team warns.

The same 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that sharply reduced the courts' level of deference for federal agencies' interpretation of federal laws could mean that EBSA opinion letters will end up having less authority than they used to have, the team adds.