A giant banner featuring a serious-looking Donald Trump now hangs down the front of the Department of Labor’s Washington DC office. Covering the windows of nearly three floors, the poster reads: “American Workers FIRST.”
“Mr President, I invite you see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American worker,” the labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeReme, said last month at a cabinet meeting with the president.
Staff at the agency say they have other concerns. “Everyone thinks it’s a joke because it is a joke. There are parts of the building that have not been fixed. We have closed bathrooms all over the place. The front door doesn’t work, it’s been broken for two months, but we have money for a stupid banner,” said one worker, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
“Seeing her in that cabinet meeting where she begged Trump to look at it, it’s embarrassing. Fawning over the president, regardless of who the president is, acting that way means she can’t give him hard or bad news and you should be able to do that if you’re a leader.”
Employees at the department and labor advocates say the Trump administration is undermining the agency’s mission to foster and promote the welfare of job seekers, wage earners and retirees through drastic cuts, deregulations that include pay cuts for workers, and mistreatment of those employed at the agency.
About 20% of staff at the US Department of Labor have resigned or retired ahead of threatened cuts at the agency.
The agency has also proposed nearly 150 deregulatory actions, including a proposal to eliminate minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million domestic care workers, in addition to cuts undertaken by the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge) such as office lease cancellations, and cutting millions in international labor grants.
“They are gutting us. They are taking away everything that makes us helpful to the citizens of the states we work in,” said a current employee at the department’s wage and hour division who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “They say they’re changing things for the American worker. I was born in the US and am a veteran. I’m an American worker and they don’t care about us.”
The secretary of labor’s chief of staff sent out a memo in April 2025 to all department employees warning they could face “serious legal consequences” if they speak to the media. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employees have a protected right to speak to the media about their working conditions and labor concerns.
“A federal worker shouldn’t be scared to speak the truth. For me to even be concerned about speaking is ridiculous, it’s how we stand up to protect ourselves and those around us,” they said.
The worker explained they now have to get any fieldwork approved beforehand, and it has to be tied to a pre-existing case. In the meantime, employers are being pushed to perform self-audits.
This, coupled with the drastic staffing cuts faced throughout the US Department of Labor, they argued, is undermining the department’s ability to enforce wage and hour laws.
“We don’t have manning to do these enforcement, day-in-day-out, jobs,” they added. “The department has tried to push these self-audits, where they are allowing bad actors to self-audit,” they said. “Those bad actors are going to essentially get away with it.”
The Department of Labor only provided comment on the maintenance and repairs, claiming they were working to improve the overall maintenance of the building, and claimed all 91 bathrooms had recently been repaired.
“This fake news hit piece is exactly why public trust in the mainstream media is at historic lows,” said a labor department spokesperson, Courtney Parella.
Morale has plummeted as the national office amid all the cuts at the agency, threats, harassment and intimidation from the administration, and new policies, such as security bag screenings to get into the building every day, said workers.
“It’s kind of like working in a prison,” they added. “It’s very clear how they treat us is a bellwether for how they want other workers to be treated.”
“The Department of Labor is being deployed fully as one arm of this president’s war on workers, which is even more painful given that the mission of the Department of Labor is to protect workers,” said Julie Su, who served as secretary of labor under the Biden administration. “The way you treat your own workers is a sign of how you believe workers in general deserve to be treated. And this administration has taken a very destructive approach to its own workers.”
Su also criticized the Department of Labor’s adoption of rhetoric from the Trump administration, in claiming to “put American workers first” and usher in a “golden age” for “American workers”.
“This administration, they constantly talk about doing right by American workers. That’s a pretty coded way of saying what they want to say, which is that they no longer believe that immigrant workers deserve protection and that’s part of their overall war on workers,” Su said. “It’s an anti-immigrant philosophy of the entire administration, but for the Department of Labor to adopt it is especially harmful, because so many workers who keep our economy going are immigrant workers.”
She cited other examples of policies that harm workers being pursued by this administration, from cutting $500m in grants dedicated toward fighting child labor and forced labor abroad, delaying implementation of a rule to protect coalminers from silica dust exposure, pushing to create an exemption for employers to the general duty clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act that obligates employers to keep workers safe on the job, and ceasing enforcement of expanded labor protections for immigrant farm workers on H-2A temporary visas.
Among the deregulations being pushed by the Department of Labor include proposing a rule to exempt 3.7 million home health and personal care workers in the US from minimum wage and overtime protections.
These workers are predominantly women and paid low wages, with immigrants comprising a significant and growing portion of the workforce.
“What the US Department of Labor is proposing is the Trump administration reversing history, and saying, no, wait a minute, home care workers are not deserving of overtime protections, of minimum wage, and that just sets us back into a whole other era,” said Arnulfo De La Cruz, president of SEIU Local 2015, which represents over half a million long-term care workers in California. “This change would undo a decade of progress toward recognizing home care as real professional work, and this is yet another Trump administration attack on workers. This comes down to special interests who want to increase their profits by paying workers less.”
Astrid Zuniga, a home care worker in Modesto, California, and president of United Domestic Workers of America, UDW/AFSCME Local 3930, said she would stand to lose about $1,200 a month if overtime protections are removed for care workers, which she relies on to cover the costs of medications her son needs, who has autism, epilepsy and other intellectual disabilities, and who she cares for 24/7.
“To lose that much money a month, when most of us already live paycheck to paycheck as it is, would be damaging to many households,” said Zuniga. “When you go and you implement these kinds of cuts to the low-wage workforce, that only hurts the workers and most of these workers are making right at about minimum wage.”
She emphasized home care workers were already bracing for the impact of Medicaid cuts to benefits and services that will also decrease their ability to provide services to clients.
“Home care is the fastest-growing sector of workers across the nation. It is the highest in demand. Nobody is getting any younger or any healthier,” she added. “Cuts should not be made to these types of services,” she said. “And if we’re not making this a desirable workforce and not making investments into these kinds of home- and community-based services that our most vulnerable communities rely on, what are we doing?”
“I think the message is that they think workers have it too good, too many protections, too high of wages, too much security. Their view is that workers are too comfortable,” added Su.
