Trump’s labor secretary resigns amid investigation into misconduct
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned, becoming the third member of President Trump's Cabinet out in just the last few weeks.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
White House communications director Steven Cheung announced on X that Chavez-DeRemer was leaving, saying she had done a phenomenal job. She was being investigated for misconduct.
MARTIN: NPR labor correspondent Andrea Hsu is with us now to tell us more about this. Good morning, Andrea.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Do we know why Chavez-DeRemer resigned?
HSU: Well, the official line from Steven Cheung is that she's taking a job in the private sector, and that's something she confirmed in her own post on X yesterday. But we also know that she was being investigated by the Labor Department's inspector general over complaints of professional misconduct, and that investigation, Michel, has been going on for months. Several of her senior staffers have already been forced out. And following President Trump's removal of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in early March, and then a month later, Attorney General Pam Bondi, you know, there's been talk that the labor secretary might be the next to go.
MARTIN: So what do we know about the allegations that were being investigated?
HSU: Well, yeah, according to reporting from the New York Post and other media outlets, there were complaints that she was having an affair with a subordinate - her security detail - also drinking on the job, taking staffers to a strip club, and using taxpayer-funded travel to spend time with friends and family in places like Las Vegas. Now, NPR has not independently verified the contents of the investigation, but we do know it was ongoing and a distraction for the administration.
MARTIN: Now, we mentioned she's the third Cabinet member to go. She's not as well known, I would say, as Kristi Noem or Pam Bondi. How was she selected for this job? Do we have any sense of why she was picked for this role?
HSU: Yeah. Well, she was a one-term congresswoman from Oregon, a moderate Republican, and she lost her seat in 2024. But then the Teamsters president, Sean O'Brien, pushed for her nomination as labor secretary. O'Brien liked her because she was one of the few Republicans who supported the PRO Act. That's a bill aimed at making it easier for workers to unionize. And you might recall that Sean O'Brien was a prime-time speaker at the Republican convention in the summer of 2024. And while he didn't endorse Trump, his decision not to endorse any candidate for president was huge for Trump. And Chavez-DeRemer ended up at the Labor Department.
Now, under her watch, I should say, the Trump administration has not made anything easier for labor unions. In fact, Trump has tried to strip collective bargaining rights from about a million federal workers, and the administration has been rolling back various protections for other workers as well.
MARTIN: Is there something noteworthy that we could point to that Chavez-DeRemer achieved in her year in office?
HSU: Well, sources at the Labor Department said she was not actually in the office a whole lot. She went on what she called her America at Work listening tour, which did take her to all 50 states. She visited, you know, training centers. She talked about apprenticeships and the blue-collar boom that the Trump administration has been touting. Now, that has not materialized. In fact, manufacturing jobs are down since Trump took office last year. And overall, the labor market has been pretty much in a holding pattern amid a lot of economic uncertainty.
Steven Cheung said her deputy, Keith Sonderling, will step in as acting labor secretary. He's already been running a lot of the day-to-day operations at the Labor Department. He served in the department during Trump's first term and later at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. So in many ways, he is much more familiar with the inner workings of government than Chavez-DeRemer was.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Andrea Hsu. Andrea, thank you.
HSU: You're welcome.
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