Another Trump Cabinet Member Is Out

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When Lori Chavez-DeRemer was nominated, she had a chance to be a pathbreaking secretary of labor, supposedly tasked with shepherding the Republican Party in a more worker-friendly direction. Instead, she turned out to be a typical Trump Cabinet member: disempowered and disgraced. Now she has added dismissed to that list.

Chavez-DeRemer’s departure was announced yesterday evening in an X post from White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, who said she would “take a position in the private sector.” He said that Keith Sonderling, the deputy secretary, will be acting secretary.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to serve in this historic Administration and work for the greatest President of my lifetime,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote on X.

Chavez-DeRemer is unlikely to be missed at the Labor Department, in part because it seems she was hardly ever there. Employees said that she was an absentee secretary, and Sonderling has reportedly already been effectively running the department for some time. When Chavez-DeRemer was present, she brought scandals with her. Shortly after her confirmation last spring, she threw what looked a lot like a birthday party for herself at department headquarters—on her birthday, with her picture on television screens and staffers singing “Happy Birthday.” To justify spending government funds on the bash, the department called it a swearing-in ceremony. Chavez-DeRemer told a House committee, “I did not have a birthday party,” but The New York Times obtained a picture of the secretary blowing out candles on a cake.

This episode set the pattern for Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure as secretary. In January, a complaint was filed with the department’s inspector general, an internal watchdog, and Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff were placed on leave and later forced out. Among the allegations against the secretary were claims that she was having the department pay for personal trips, drinking on the job, taking staffers to strip clubs, and in a romantic relationship with a bodyguard, who was also placed on leave this past winter. In February, the Times reported that Chavez-DeRemer’s husband had been barred from Labor Department headquarters after at least two staffers alleged he had sexually assaulted them. (He has “categorically” denied the allegations.)

This spring, the Times also reported that three more employees had filed civil-rights complaints against Chavez-DeRemer, adding claims that she retaliated against staffers for cooperating with an investigation and asked some to run errands for her husband. According to the Times, investigations uncovered evidence that Chavez-DeRemer allegedly dispatched aides to bring wine to her hotel room on trips, including during the workday. Her father and husband were both said to have texted young female department employees, who were instructed by Chavez-DeRemer and an aide to “pay attention” to the two men. Chavez-DeRemer has not specifically responded to the allegations in the January complaint, but issued a “general denial” through a lawyer; she and her husband did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Times about the new allegations.

Chavez-DeRemer’s departure, as the probes into her and press scrutiny both escalated, is thus no surprise. But it’s the latest evidence that President Trump’s “no scalps” policy, in which he refused to push out aides for fear of giving wins to Democrats or the press, is defunct. What’s notable in the new era is who gets fired. Trump has pushed out Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (who was also accused of having an affair with a staffer and abuse of public resources, which she denied), and now Chavez-DeRemer—all women.

Meanwhile, top male aides have so far escaped consequence for allegations similarly serious to the ones that got Noem and Chavez-DeRemer pushed out. As my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Friday, officials have been concerned about FBI Director Kash Patel repeatedly drinking to excess (Patel has denied this, and is suing The Atlantic); Patel has also used FBI aircraft to travel to several destinations, including to visit his girlfriend in Nashville, where FBI SWAT team members have provided security to her. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who faced numerous allegations of excessive drinking at the time of his confirmation, has also reportedly mingled family and work, bringing his wife into high-level discussions. (Hegseth has denied all allegations of wrongdoing.) The only public fallout from the “Signalgate” scandal, in which Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a chat where highly sensitive matters were being discussed, was that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz was reassigned to a cushy post as ambassador to the United Nations.

Chavez-DeRemer has been so plagued with scandals that it’s easy to forget that her tenure began with a very different sort of controversy. Her nomination, urged by the president of the Teamsters, was seen as evidence of the Republican Party under Trump prioritizing workers’ interests. As a U.S. representative from Oregon, Chavez-DeRemer had a history of voting with Democrats. She was one of three House Republicans to co-sponsor the PRO Act, an organized-labor-backed bill to make unionizing easier. Even as many Trump picks were easily confirmed, Chavez-DeRemer faced a grilling from fellow Republicans over her stances on labor, though she ultimately won all but a handful of their votes.

But she leaves behind little legacy on policy. Maybe that’s because Chavez-DeRemer allegedly spent much of her tenure partying and then playing defense on investigations, but it’s also because Trump likes to centralize policy decisions in the White House, rather than empowering Cabinet members. And Trump himself appears to have lost interest in a worker-friendly agenda, if he ever had it in the first place. At the start of his second administration, the president fired a pro-union member of the National Labor Relations Board (though the dismissal is still being challenged in court) and slashed union protections for roughly a million federal workers.

Since then, the president’s attention has shifted from domestic politics to foreign interventions, especially the war in Iran, and GOP figures with more labor-friendly rhetoric, including Vice President Vance and Senator Josh Hawley, have put little focus on workers’ issues. Support for labor unions among Republican voters has dropped sharply, and union leaders who hoped to cultivate an alliance with Trump have mostly lost hope in him. Trump’s approval in the working class has also been dented by inflation, which has only worsened as a result of the Iran war.

With Chavez-DeRemer gone, the Labor Department will surely be a more functional and less scandal-ridden workplace. Sonderling is said to be a more traditional pro-business figure, but regardless of whom Trump nominates as a permanent leader, the department is unlikely to matter much for the rest of his presidency. The real acting secretary of labor will always be Trump himself.