Leadership Change at the Labor Department  

Past Republican administrations have courted failure when appointing Labor Department officials favorable to organized labor. Dwight Eisenhower’s labor secretary resigned after an AFL-CIO vs. business community dispute over the Taft-Hartley Act. Richard Nixon courted organized labor and appointed a union leader to his cabinet, but the political results were limited. Gerald Ford later replaced Nixon’s appointee with an academic whom the AFL-CIO would later recommend for Jimmy Carter’s cabinet, before Ford vetoed union-supported legislation under pressure from conservative primary challenger Ronald Reagan.   

Despite these cautionary tales and the examples set in President Trump’s first administration, Trump still chose to tap Lori Chavez-DeRemer—Teamster boss Sean O’Brien’s favored candidate—for labor secretary. When she was in Congress, Chavez-DeRemer had cosponsored the PRO Act, legislation to strengthen organized labor, which earned her praise from every conservative’s favorite union boss, Randi Weingarten.  

The Pivot  

The Chavez-DeRemer experiment was a consequence of the 2024 election and the evolving special-interest strategy of Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien. Perhaps betting that Donald Trump would reward his union for merely not endorsing Democrat Kamala Harris at the national level (local Teamsters unions and councils, including those in the decisive swing states, endorsed Harris). O’Brien’s choice, ex-Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) had a record of doing Big Labor’s bidding (she cosponsored the “everything Big Labor ever wanted and a pony” PRO Act), which helped her earn a tacit endorsement from Randi Weingarten, also a supporter of the lockdown, de facto open borders, and socialists. 

Chavez-DeRemer proved to be an absentee landlord who (allegedly) was more interested in personal fooling around than in making the AFL-CIO great again. Under pressure from the Labor Department’s Inspector General, Congress, and the press, she quit for the “private sector” earlier this year. 

Several months later, we still have little idea what that cryptic “private sector” referred to. Chavez-DeRemer has launched a political committee, the American Workers First PAC, about which little is known, other than that it uses the Republican payment-processing conduit WinRed. She was also photographed wearing a “staff” badge at a Teamsters Union convention, which is odd, to say the least. 

The Change  

But Chavez-DeRemer is gone now, unmade by her (alleged) proclivities. In her place has come her former deputy, Keith Sonderling, whose qualifications and tack are more aligned with the historical consensus of the Republican Party that elected President Donald Trump. As I wrote upon Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation: 

Deputy Secretary Sonderling deserves much of the credit for preventing Big Labor from having the run of a Republican Labor Department. According to the White House, Sonderling will act as Labor Secretary on an interim basis, and the administration could do worse than promoting him on a permanent one. 

President Trump seems to agree, announcing on June 29 that he would nominate Sonderling to be Labor Secretary on a permanent basis.  

RedState’s Jennifer Oliver O’Connell details Sonderling’s prior record: 

Sonderling served in President Trump’s first term as Deputy Administrator of the Wage and Hour Labor Division. In that role, Sonderling was instrumental in the formation and language incorporated in the 2020 Trump Independent Contractor rule, which protected the role of independent contractors, allowing them to maintain their status, freedom, and flexibility. In 2021, the Biden administration rescinded this rule and instituted its own. After Trump won the election in 2024, Sonderling worked to cease enforcement of the 2024 Biden independent contractor rule, and helped to craft the 2026 Trump Independent Contractor rule which follows the framework of Trump’s 2021 rule, but incorporates modifications to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA). 

In elevating Sonderling, President Trump has followed his own example rather than those of special-interest operators who do not share the Republican Party and its coalition’s interests.  

Speed Bumps, Fears, and Loopholes 

With a Republican president making an appointment and Republicans in the Senate majority, Sonderling’s confirmation should be academic. But there are potential speed bumps, namely Josh Hawley’s seat on the Senate HELP committee, which has jurisdiction over labor nominations. Hawley is one of the Republican senators most sympathetic to organized labor, having introduced legislation to give a federal agency that President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency tried to close down amid concerns about corruption (the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service) the power to dictate contracts in recently unionized workplaces. 

House Republicans from union-dominated states joined with Democrats to pass it out of the House of Representatives, and now it sits before the Senate. In theory, Hawley could hold Sonderling hostage in consideration of his legislation. 

Or rather, he could hold Sonderling hostage, if not for a convenient loophole precedent that the Biden administration created. When Labor Secretary Marty Walsh left the Biden administration to head the National Hockey League’s players’ union, President Biden promoted Walsh’s deputy, critical race theoretician Julie Su, to be Acting Labor Secretary. He formally nominated her to the permanent position as well, and with Democrats in control of the Senate, her confirmation should have been academic. But it was not; some Democrats did not support her confirmation, and it was never voted upon. Instead, Su continued to serve as labor secretary, based on her prior confirmation as deputy secretary, until President Biden left office. This was held to be lawful because of a statute that allows the Deputy Secretary of Labor specifically to “perform the duties of the Secretary until a successor is appointed.” 

One should now see the parallel with Sonderling’s situation and Hawley’s dilemma. The Senate cannot, under the Su precedent, prevent Sonderling from “performing the duties of the secretary” because Sonderling is the Senate-confirmed deputy secretary. That means Hawley cannot meaningfully take his nomination hostage for his own legislative agenda—an act that might also anger the mercurial two-time president who nominated Sonderling. 

Perhaps the inevitability of Sonderling’s acting as labor secretary regardless of his actions will motivate the Senate to quickly confirm his nomination. Sonderling’s qualifications and experience have the potential to make the second Trump administration’s labor policy look more like that of the first Trump administration and put the Teamsters-appeasement experiment to bed—again.  

A Sonderling-led Labor Department would likely differ from Su’s tenure and from the approach many were concerned that Chavez-DeRemer would take. Rather than prioritizing policies favored by organized labor and its left-wing–funded think tanks, it would likely return the department to a more conventional Republican labor-policy framework.  

 

 

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/leadership-change-at-the-labor-department/