Lori Chavez-DeRemer lasted all of 12 months as U.S. labor secretary. A White House spokesperson announced her departure April 20 after months of scandal over alleged drinking on the job, inappropriate sexual conduct, and misuse of public funds.
Chavez-DeRemer is a Republican Congresswoman from Oregon who lost re-election in 2024 after serving one term. Her appointment as labor secretary was recommended to Donald Trump’s second presidential administration by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and his friend Markwayne Mullin, the Republican senator from Oklahoma who is now Trump’s secretary of homeland security. O’Brien had earned the president’s favor because the Teamsters remained neutral during the election and because he spoke at the 2024 Republican convention and praised Trump as “one tough SOB.”
In her February 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, Chavez-DeRemer renounced her previous cosponsorship of the pro-union PRO Act. Still, her installation the following month was seen by some as a potential bridge between the Trump administration and organized labor.
The labor secretary, a cabinet position, is in charge of a broad array of worker protection agencies that enforce wage and hour and health and safety laws and oversee workers compensation and apprenticeship programs. But Chavez-DeRemer never seemed that interested in the policy details. When Trump’s special representative Elon Musk canceled programs in her department, she played the part of the administration loyalist.
Ten months into the job, on Jan. 9, the conservative tabloid The New York Post published the first in a series of damning accounts about Chavez-DeRemer’s conduct and the office culture she installed at the top of Labor Department. The accounts were leaked from an ongoing investigation by the department’s inspector general. (Inspectors general are independent nonpartisan officials within government agencies who investigate fraud, waste, and abuse.)
According to allegations reported by the Post over the next three months, Chavez-DeRemer had an extramarital affair with a subordinate (bodyguard Brian Sloan). She maintained a stash of champagne, bourbon, and Kahlua in her office and drank during the work day. She committed “travel fraud” by directing her chief of staff Jihun Han and deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright to “make up” official trips to destinations where she could spend time with family or friends on the taxpayers’ dime. She was rarely in the office, and visited 37 states on more than 50 official trips. After speaking for an hour at an official function, she’d spend the rest of the time on personal business. On one of the official trips, a month into the job, Chavez-DeRemer took subordinates to Angels PDX, a Southeast Portland strip club.
The Post pointed out that Chavez-DeRemer had earlier showed a taste for expensive travel during her failed 2024 campaign for reelection to Congress, spending over $56,000 of campaign funds on luxury hotels and resorts in Miami, Utah, Arizona, Wisconsin, and elsewhere and $4,345 on limo and chauffeur services.
Chavez-DeRemer also allegedly had aides do personal errands like cleaning out her closets and bringing her bottles of wine.
The shenanigans extended beyond Chavez-DeRemer to her family. Husband Shawn DeRemer was banned from the Labor Department headquarters after he was accused of inappropriately touching at least two female staffers, though DC police, Federal Protective Service, and a federal prosecutor all declined to pursue charges.
The Post also reported that Chavez-DeRemer told female staffers to “pay attention” to her husband and her father, retired Teamster Richard Chavez. Texts reviewed by the New York Times showed that the elder Chavez communicated with young female members of his daughter’s staff and asked a staffer to keep his text message private.
Han and Wright had both worked for Chavez-DeRemer when she was in Congress. Han, a Republican political operative, managed her campaigns for state representative and her 2022 run for Congress. Both Han and Wright were accused of belittling and bullying staffers, and were placed on administrative leave Jan. 12 allegedly for exerting improper influence over junior staff during the inspector general’s investigation. On March 2 they resigned under pressure from the White House.
Sloan, the bodyguard, was also placed on leave and later resigned. A fourth staffer — Director of Advance Melissa Robey — was fired after she turned in vouchers for excessive travel-related expenditures on vehicles and hotel stays.
Chavez-DeRemer’s exit was announced in a post on X.com April 20 by White House spokesperson Steven Cheung.
“Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector,” he wrote, adding, “she has done a phenomenal job.”
In her own X post that day, Chavez-DeRemer said the allegations against her, her family, and her team had been “peddled by high-ranked deep state actors who have been coordinating with the one-sided news media.”
“While my time serving in the Administration comes to a conclusion,” she wrote in a post from another account, “it doesn’t mean I will stop fighting for American workers.”
Having served just a year, spent mostly on the road, Chavez-DeRemer didn’t stay in the job long enough to make an impact. But under her watch, Labor Department action didn’t sound much like fighting for American workers. Last year the department started the process to undo agency rules that employers see as costly and burdensome. One rule slated for elimination requires that workers employed by home care agencies be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and be eligible for overtime pay. Another “burdensome” rule requires seat belts when agricultural employers provide transportation to workers. Chavez-DeRemer also supported the elimination of Job Corps and the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, which promotes the welfare of wage-earning women through education and outreach. Chavez-DeRemer’s work remains unfinished: Congress hasn’t yet agreed to defund those agencies.
Now that she’s out, the Labor Department is being led by Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, a former employer-side labor lawyer from Florida who in Trump’s first term served as head of the Wage and Hour division and as a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
