Judging by her social media accounts, it’s been a busy first few weeks for America’s new labor secretary. Since being sworn in March 11, former Oregon Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer has enlisted in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort to cancel government grants and contracts.
On March 21, she released a video touting some of the savings. “Last week, the department terminated several foreign aid grants, saving over $38 million,” Chavez-DeRemer said. “I bet you didn’t even know that your hard-earned tax dollars were being spent on things like enhancing transparency and accountability in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry, promoting policies related to so-called climate change programs in Brazil and Colombia, supporting collective bargaining in Indonesia and Guatemala, and overseeing progress on labor standards in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
It’s true: The agency she heads, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), was spending money on all that and more. In one of the examples she cited, the DOL’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking allocated $1.1 million this fiscal year to an AFL-CIO-linked nonprofit called the Solidarity Center to combat forced labor and even forced child labor in Uzbekistan, where as many as 2 million workers plant and pick cotton. No more.
Uzbekistan is a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that devolved into one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world, with a reputation for boiling enemies alive. For years it was the target of an international boycott campaign because it used state-imposed forced labor to pick cotton during harvest season. That campaign was effective enough in moving the regime to end abuses that the boycott ended in 2022. The grant Chavez-DeRemer cancelled was a kind of mop-up operation intended to provide monitoring and workers rights training so forced and child labor would not return. Its cancellation drew condemnation not just from labor rights advocates but also from the American Apparel & Footwear Association, a trade group.
The Uzbekistan program is considered one of the more successful campaigns by the Solidarity Center, which gets nearly all of its $60 million a year budget via federal dollars —from DOL, and from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID. Both NED and USAID have been cut dramatically on orders of DOGE.
The Solidarity Center — with a board led by AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler and other union leaders — is one of four “institutes” of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Started by President Ronald Reagan, NED is an independent nonprofit funded by the U.S. government. In Uzbekistan and elsewhere, the Solidarity Center often works in tandem with an NED-funded sister organization led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE).
The cancelled Uzbekistan grant is just one drop in a sea of woe for international labor rights work. When Trump took office, the Solidarity Center had about 200 workers in 50 field offices in more than 70 countries and another 200 at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The wave of canceled grants led to the layoff of more than half that staff by late March.
On March 26, DOL moved to end all grants it was making through its Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) — $500 million for 69 programs to combat child labor, forced labor and human trafficking and to enforce labor standards in more than 40 countries. ILAB also works with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to monitor compliance with the labor commitments of trade agreements like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that Trump negotiated in his first term. In posts on social media, Chavez-DeRemer called ILAB’s programs “America Last” grants.
DOL also cancelled contracts for IT and career training support with the consulting firms Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton for a savings of $3 million. The two firms are on a list of 10 big-time federal contractors that are being targeted for cancellation by the administration.
