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department of labor
Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot.
Aug 02, 2025
I spent much of the 1990s as U.S. secretary of labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.
So what does President Donald Trump do? With one fell swoop Friday he destroyed the BLS.
Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May. Revisions in monthly jobs report are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger, and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he approves of.
Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else—presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot. Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger, and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he approves of.
So we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.
Trump is in the process of trying to do the same thing with the Federal Reserve—demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.
What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell give in to Trump? It loses it. In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation, as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat, and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.
Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency. It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy, and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of Indigenous people. He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.
This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.
This is what fascism looks like, friends.
We must fight this with everything we have.
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Trump’s Brand of Law Enforcement: Deportation Yes, Worker Protection No
Let’s contrast the lengths to which this administration will go to forcibly remove productive, noncriminal immigrants and their families, with a recent and mostly unnoticed action the Trump Labor Department took a few weeks ago.
Jul 19, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump claims to be all about law enforcement. But what laws he chooses to prioritize, and which get the back seat, or are ignored entirely, speak volumes about the heart and soul of this administration. Recent developments in immigration and labor law enforcement offer some trenchant examples.
I spent the entirety of my almost-40-year civil service career enforcing federal worker protection laws with the U.S. Department of Labor, including the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), whose purpose is to guarantee that the workers actually receive at least the minimum wage and overtime pay that Congress has mandated.
Enforcing laws like the FLSA for the benefit of workers in the U.S.—across the many millions of workplaces in this country, with very limited investigative and attorney staff—is no easy task. How closely any given federal agency can approach the goal of widespread compliance depends on many factors, most prominent being the level of resourcing Congress has made available, and the effectiveness of the strategies the agency chooses to deploy.
On the immigration front, the president has broadcast far and wide his intention to remove everyone who’s in this country without legal authority (a civil, not criminal violation) as his top enforcement priority. His just-signed budget bill massively increases the funds available for “building the wall” and ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency whose job will be to penetrate every community in the country, find those “without papers,” and arrest and deport them. And then there are prisons like “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades, and the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, designed to terrify as many as possible into self-deporting, and to detain indefinitely those who fail to comply.
Immigrants have known for a while where they stand with Trump. The picture has never been pretty, and it’s a whole lot uglier now. Workers, including those who voted for him, are beginning to learn where they stand too.
The flood of dollars slated to supercharge the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) enforcement capacity, along with its terror strategy designed to induce self-removal, will no doubt make serious headway toward the president’s goal. But there are so many reasons why this is both a cruel and foolish policy—including, because the U.S. will be left with fewer workers (citizen and noncitizen), fewer people spending money, and a smaller economy overall. But it’s an example, albeit a dark and nefarious one, of how enforcement results can be accomplished if the administration has both the will and the political power to get them done.
Let’s contrast the lengths to which this administration will go to forcibly remove productive, noncriminal immigrants and their families, with a recent and mostly unnoticed action the Trump Labor Department took a few weeks ago.
Large numbers of workers in the U.S. are cheated out of the minimum wage or overtime they’re entitled to under the FLSA—an unlawful practice known colloquially as “wage theft”—to the tune of billions of dollars per year. A primary reason for this high rate of noncompliance by employers inclined to evade the law is the paltry level of funding the department’s enforcement divisions receive, relative to the millions of businesses they’re responsible to oversee. Given the size of their mission to protect workers, the Labor Department’s (DOL) ranks are tiny, have shrunk significantly due to the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal budget, and are slated to be cut 35% in the FY 2026 budget.
While staffing today is exceptionally bare-bones, the DOL has always needed to deploy its limited resources for maximum impact. Fifteen years ago, I was part of a team that developed a wage law compliance-enhancing strategy that wouldn’t depend on hiring more enforcement personnel. It was founded on FLSA’s mandate that when an employer commits wage theft, it will owe the worker both the amount of the underpayment and an equal amount in “liquidated damages,” with very limited exceptions.
The law’s requiring payment of double back wages makes sound enforcement sense. It compensates workers for costs they incurred on account of being underpaid, and it also incentivizes unscrupulous employers to comply. If an employer who shorted his workers is only required to pay back what he owed in the first place, he’s really getting an interest-free loan that the worker never agreed to. That’s hardly a recipe for encouraging compliance.
And yet, for too long, that’s how the vast majority of DOL investigations finding wage underpayments were resolved. So, 15 years ago DOL assembled a team to address this serious enforcement deficiency, and we conceived a new strategy. Employers who engaged in wage theft were given a choice: be sued for double back pay, or settle for that amount without having to go to court. If the employer believed they shouldn’t have to pay double, or shouldn’t have to pay at all, no gun was pointed to their head. They could go to court and challenge DOL’s claims. But if, recognizing they’d likely lose in court and that settlement was a better option, they’d need to pay the workers the double back wages the law says they owe.
The Labor Department began implementing this policy in 2010, and over the past decade and a half, workers in scores of cases have received millions of dollars in back wages and liquidated damages, DOL’s litigation resources have been spared, and U.S. district courts are less clogged than they would have been if these resolutions in lieu of litigation hadn’t happened. Since 2010, this enforcement strategy has been challenged only once, and the court found it to be reasonable. It also exemplifies sound enforcement strategy designed to spur compliance, and government efficiency, to boot.
And yet, on June 27, the acting administrator of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division saw fit to prohibit DOL staff from entering into any wage theft settlements in which workers receive double back pay, if the case hasn’t been filed in court. The clear impact will be that most workers who are victims of wage theft will once again become unwilling interest-free lenders to their employers, and corner-cutting employers will have no incentive to comply with the law. Regrettably, this isn’t the first such slap against workers, and undoubtedly won’t be the last.
To recap: On immigration enforcement, the Trump administration, and a compliant Republican-majority Congress, are pulling out all the stops to remove unauthorized immigrants—whether law-abiding, taxpaying, contributing members of our communities or not—as part of a dreadfully misguided but comprehensive DHS enforcement policy designed to intimidate and coerce.
The Trump Labor Department, meanwhile, just went out of its way to end a successful, court-approved enforcement strategy designed to make whole workers victimized by wage theft, and to deter unscrupulous employers from engaging in these types of violations.
Immigrants have known for a while where they stand with Trump. The picture has never been pretty, and it’s a whole lot uglier now.
Workers, including those who voted for him, are beginning to learn where they stand too. Suffice it to say: not exactly at the front of the line.
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Trump Assault on Federal Contractor Wages Could Mean 25% Pay Cuts for Hundreds of Thousands
"A higher federal contractor wage standard is good for employers and the federal government overall," said one left-leaning think tank.
Apr 11, 2025
After U.S. President Donald Trump last month undid a Biden-era regulation that required businesses that contract with the federal government to pay their workers a $17.75 an hour minimum wage, the Center for American Progress released an analysis Friday which found that some workers impacted by the change could see a 25% pay cut.
Thanks to rollback from Trump, "corporations working on government contracts are free to cut wages for hundreds of thousands of workers," according to the author of the analysis, who also said that the move constitutes a new front in the Trump administration's "war on workers."
Former President Joe Biden's order, which was announced in 2021 and went into effect in 2022, initially raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour with automatic updates, which bumped it the minimum up to $17.75 in January 2025.
The rescission was part of an executive order that reversed 18 "harmful executive orders and actions" issued by Biden.
According to CAP, a liberal think tank, Trump's scrapping of the Biden minimum wage protection leaves in place an Obama-era rule, meaning some workers on federal contracts can now be paid a minimum of $13.30 an hour.
The analysis arrived at the 25% pay cut by calculating the difference between the $17.75 floor and $13.30. However, CAP noted that the U.S. Department of Labor still has to issue guidance over how it will enforce this older wage standard.
Other wage protections for workers on federal contracts exist, but CAP argues that "they are inadequate for protecting the workers who just saw their minimum wage taken away."
The Davis-Bacon Act establishes minimum prevailing wage standards for workers on federal construction sites, for example, but the wages established under the law can be much lower than $17.75 an hour, according to the analysis.
"The boost for workers from the Biden minimum wage increase that the Trump administration just nullified was substantial," according to CAP, which cites a Department of Labor estimate from 2021 that the change would impact 327,300 employees in the first year of implementation.
In 2021, the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute estimated that, taking into account the hundreds of thousands of workers who could see their wages raised through Biden's executive order, the total pay increases thanks to the rule would amount to $1.2 billion in 2022.
"A higher minimum wage for federal contractors helps ensure that taxpayer dollars incentivize good jobs, rather than low-wage jobs where contractors compete with each other in a race to the bottom," according to a statement from EPI following Trump's rescission of the minimum wage rule. "A higher federal contractor wage standard is good for employers and the federal government overall."
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