Trump’s Labor Secretary’s Impressive Legacy of Sleaze

In September 2024, the Teamsters, whose strutting fool of a president, Sean O’Brien, had been gifted the month before with a prime time slot at the Republican National Convention, took a dive on endorsing a presidential candidate. It was the first time the Teamsters had not endorsed since 1992, and a thoroughly irrational choice, given that Donald Trump opposed labor rights during his first term and, unsurprisingly, has continued to do so in his second. After Trump was elected, O’Brien was rewarded with the selection of his favored candidate, former Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Republican of Oregon, for labor secretary. She turned out to be a total, scandal-plagued hack, and on Monday she joined the procession of departing Cabinet officials—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and now Chavez- DeRemer—judged too corrupt, or perhaps (in the case of Bondi) not corrupt enough, to serve the most corrupt president in American history.Chavez DeRemer is by far the least well-known in this (notably, all-female) cavalcade, probably because people seldom pay much attention to the labor secretary. Her initial reception among labor unions was mildly favorable, with AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler taking note that she’d been one of only three House Republicans to cosponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would expand labor rights for private-sector unions, and one of only eight to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would do the same for public-sector unions. It was encouraging to observe some opposition to Chavez-DeRemer in the business world and among conservative GOP legislators. “She’s one of them,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told Politico. “She’s pro-union.”But it turned out Tuberville (now running for Alabama governor) had little to fear. At her confirmation hearing, Chavez-DeRemer hedged obligingly on her support for the PRO Act, calling the bill “imperfect” and explicitly rejecting a crucially important section of it that would overturn state right-to-work laws. She also dodged questions about whether she’d support raising the minimum wage from the current hourly $7.25, in deference to Trump’s studied inscrutability on the matter. (In 2016 candidate Trump took so many contradictory positions on the minimum wage that The Washington Post published a guide to them; in-office Trump has effectively opposed any raise, most notably by canceling a Biden-era executive order requiring federal contractors to increase their hourly minimum to $15.) Chavez-DeRemer demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Trump’s agenda that in the end only three Republicans opposed her; Tuberville voted to confirm. As secretary, Chavez-DeRemer logged a mediocre enforcement record, reducing, for example, the number of concluded compliance actions against wage and hour violations from an average of 21,000 under Biden to 17,000, and reducing the number of compliance actions against the worst performers (“low wage, high violation industries”) from an average of 842 under Biden to 649. Republican Labor secretaries get rewarded for reducing enforcement and thereby reducing the government burden on private enterprise, so if Trump considered Chavez-DeRomer’s record at all before pushing her out (probably he didn’t), he would have regarded it favorably. Chavez-DeRemer also dutifully pressed forward with Trump’s deregulatory agenda, including a potentially disastrous proposed rule to open up 401(k) plans to risky investments that is effectively a bailout for private equity—and an especially high priority for Trump.What tripped up Chavez-DeRemer in the end was an impressive series of alleged personal ethical lapses. In January, The New York Post’s Josh Christenson reported that the Labor department’s inspector general (former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, Republican of New York, a former police detective) was investigating an “explosive complaint” alleging that Chavez-DeRemer was pursuing an “inappropriate” relationship with a department underling, and (per the Post) had “welcomed her alleged paramour at least three times to her DC apartment and twice into her hotel room while traveling.” The hotel room was at Las Vegas’s Red Rocks Casino Resort and Spa, reported the Post’s Christenson, and the Post possessed photos and videos showing them there. The complaint, per Christenson, said the hotel had additional footage of the illicit couple (not seen by the Post) engaging in “unprofessional behavior,” and that the alleged lovebirds visited Las Vegas not once but twice in 2025.