Trump’s attacks on the Department of Labor will hurt wages and working conditions
In just a few months, the Trump administration has demonstrated its willingness to abandon workers and undermine their wages and working conditions. This includes repeated attacks to the Department of Labor (DOL)—the federal agency that oversees federal wage and hour laws, worker safety, workforce development, and employee benefits protection programs. Anti-worker nominations to key DOL positions—currently under Senate consideration—pose future risk to workers’ rights.
In January, Trump rescinded Executive Order 11246, which enforced anti-discrimination protections and equal employment opportunity requirements in federal contracting—effectively halting the work of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. In March, Trump rescinded an executive order that raised the minimum wage for federal contractors, which could cut these workers’ wages anywhere from 25% to 60%. In early April, the Mine Safety and Health Administration—a DOL subagency—announced they were delaying the enforcement of the Biden-era silica rule for coal miners, increasing the risk of coal miners being exposed to silica dust.
Most recently, Trump’s DOL asked to pause litigation on the Biden-era overtime pay rule, seemingly indicating that the department plans to rescind the rule that expanded the right to overtime pay for 4.3 million workers. DOL also announced it would stop enforcing a Biden-era rule that made it harder for employers to misclassify workers as independent contractors, potentially costing workers thousands of dollars each year.
May jobs report sends mixed signals: Solid payroll gains contrast with a weaker household survey and a continued decline in federal government employment
Below, EPI economists offer their insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 139,000 jobs added in May.
House Republican budget bill gives Trump $185 billion to carry out his mass deportation agenda—while doing nothing for workers: Immigration enforcement would have 80 times more funding than labor standards enforcement
House Republicans recently passed Trump’s budget reconciliation legislation that massively redistributes income from some of the poorest households to the richest. It is now under consideration in the Senate and Trump is pressuring senators to pass it without major changes. Aside from cutting taxes by trillions for the wealthy, kicking 15 million people off health care, and cutting food aid for the poor, the bill provides an unfathomable amount of additional money to fund Trump’s draconian mass deportation agenda.
In just a few months, Trump’s deportation troops have repeatedly arrested and deported the wrong people, including U.S. citizens; sent innocent people to gulags designed for terrorists in third countries; separated families and turned children into orphans; detained high school honors students; and engaged in countless other heinous actions. The bill provides $155 billion in new immigration enforcement funding—more than five times the amount of current funding—to supercharge the ability of the Trump administration to carry out more actions like these, as well as further militarize the border and build more miles of the border wall, put immigrants in new and expanded prisons, and carry out worksite raids across the country.
Altogether, as Figure A shows, Trump would have $185 billion for immigration enforcement, and this doesn’t include additional appropriations that Congress could pass in future years. Even with all that spending, there isn’t one new cent in the bill that would go to ensuring that wages and working conditions are protected by increasing funding to the federal agencies that hold lawbreaking employers accountable. In fact, the $185 billion Trump could have at his disposal to carry out his radical immigration enforcement agenda would be 80 times more than the annual government funding for labor standards enforcement. That disparity alone tells you all you need to know about how little the Trump administration prioritizes working people.
House budget bill would kick 15 million people off health insurance and damage local economies
Update: On June 4, 2025, the Congressional Budget Office released a new estimate that as many as 16 million people would lose their health insurance under the House’s budget bill.
House Republicans wanted to find a way to defray the cost of the tax cuts they passed for the richest households in the country. They chose to slash programs helping some of the most vulnerable families—including Medicaid and subsidies that let people buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This direct transfer of income from vulnerable families to the richest can be summarized in a striking symmetry: If the bill becomes law, the annual cuts to Medicaid would average over $70 billion in coming years—the same amount millionaires and billionaires would gain in tax cuts each year.
These health care spending cuts would lead directly to millions of people losing health insurance. A widely cited Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of 13.7 million people losing coverage was preliminary, and the CBO noted that more-precise estimates to come would “somewhat further increase the estimated number of people without health insurance.” More recently, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated coverage losses of at least 15 million.
The cuts to Medicaid would also damage local economies and workers throughout the United States. Even during times when the national unemployment rate is low, tens of millions live in weaker local economies with higher county unemployment rates and far less ability to weather sharp spending shocks like a Medicaid cutback would provide. In fact, a disproportionate share of the House bill’s Medicaid cuts would almost surely fall exactly on these weaker local economies. We estimate that roughly 27 million workers are in these weaker local economies, and that Medicaid cuts could depress local spending enough to force the loss of 850,000 jobs.
Republicans believe their strongest argument in favor of the health insurance cuts in this grotesquely unequal bill is that they’re simply demanding that able-bodied adults receiving Medicaid must work. Every part of this argument falls apart once the details of this bill’s cuts and their ripple effects are examined. Concretely:
- The bill’s cuts are broader and more expansive than just the work requirements for able-bodied adults.
- It is decisions made by employers and policymakers, not individual workers, that are most responsible for any particular worker being able to rack up enough work in a given month to satisfy the work requirements in the House bill.
- The more workers that are covered by public insurance programs like Medicaid, the better it is for workers’ wages—cutting Medicaid hence will harm wages going forward.
- Taking health insurance away from 15 million people will impose costs on other groups—insurance premiums for other workers could rise and state and local government contributions for uncompensated care will increase.
- Health care providers and hospitals will be forced to downsize and close, particularly in rural areas. This will not just reduce residents’ access to care—it will cause huge disruptions to local economies.
The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) succeeded in sustaining state and local government services during the pandemic: 99% of ARPA fiscal recovery funds were obligated on schedule
December 31, 2024, was the deadline for state and local governments to obligate the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) they received as part of 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). State and local governments had until the end of 2024 to commit ARPA funds to specific projects. EPI analysis of data released May 20 by the U.S. Department of the Treasury shows that state and local governments obligated 99% of the $350 billion they were allocated. This is a significant accomplishment that underscores the importance of providing timely, sufficient, and flexible aid to state and local governments during economic crises.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on state, city, county, tribal, and territorial governments. Close to 1.5 million state and local public employees lost their jobs in the first few months of the pandemic, severely limiting governments’ ability to effectively provide basic public services. After the Great Recession of 2008–2009, it took more than a decade for public-sector job numbers to return to their previous levels, in part because the federal government did not provide enough assistance to state and local governments. Austerity in public spending directly contributed to a much slower economic recovery in the 2010s. With ARPA, however, Congress and President Biden dedicated resources sufficient to tackle the scale of the problem, avoiding the missteps policymakers made in responding to the Great Recession.
Trump is making it easier for employers to discriminate. This stifles equity and hurts economic growth.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has long been a cornerstone in upholding the civil rights of U.S. workers. Established under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the EEOC is a five-member, bipartisan commission appointed by the president to enforce federal laws against employment discrimination. The Trump administration, however, has taken actions that undermine the effectiveness of the EEOC through legally questionable firings and proposed changes to data collection that are key to the EEOC’s enforcement processes.
The long-term consequences of weakening the agency threaten not only economic equity and worker protections but also economic growth. In fact—after extrapolating from widely cited research on the impacts of reduced discrimination on GDP per capita growth—we estimate that reduced discrimination boosted average living standards by $4,932 per person since 1960. If we assume the EEOC’s role in reducing discrimination accounts for 10–25% of that growth, then the agency has helped to boost average living standards by $493 to $1,233 per person since 1960.
How Trump has dismantled the federal workforce in his first 100 days
During the first 100 days of this administration, Trump has unrelentingly attacked the federal workforce, creating an environment of chaos and inefficiency that will make it harder for federal workers to provide public goods that we all rely on.
Most notable are Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, including firing thousands of probationary employees, offering buyouts, and directing federal agency heads to reduce the size of their departments. Trump has attacked federal workers’ collective bargaining rights, from limiting recognition of recently ratified collective bargaining agreements to attempting to strip more than 1 million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights for purposes of “national security.”
Trump has also issued executive orders to remove civil service protections from certain federal workers, making it easier to fire those who do not abide by his political interests. Most recently, the Trump administration proposed a rule creating the “Schedule Policy/Career” classification, which could result in thousands of federal workers being reclassified and becoming “at-will” employees—meaning they can be fired without reason.
States must safeguard language access for AAPI communities as Trump undermines federal protections
On March 1, President Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14224, designating English as the official language of the United States. This order revoked EO 13166, issued in August 2000, which aimed to improve access to federal programs for individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP). It also directs the attorney general to rescind and revise federal guidance on language access—potentially leading to the removal of critical documents for LEP communities.
While the new order does not explicitly prohibit agencies from providing services in languages other than English, it leaves such decisions to the discretion of agency leadership. This may disrupt efforts by recipients of federal funding—like state and local governments, school districts, and health care providers—to serve individuals with LEP, even though recipients of federal funding are prohibited by law from discriminating based on national origin. It is also likely to result in less coordinated and consistent language access across federal programs.
In the absence of strong federal coordination, state and local policies will become increasingly critical to ensuring that language barriers do not impede access to essential government services and communications. With a limited number of states with laws expanding language access, immigrant workers and their families are the most vulnerable to these changes—especially Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Without language accessibility, these communities are at greater risk of being denied access to social programs and their labor rights—including protections against wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and discrimination.
Americans favor labor unions over big business now more than ever
This piece was also published on Medium.
For decades, Americans were evenly divided in their relative support of labor unions and big business, but that’s no longer the case. Now, Americans are more likely to side with labor than at any time in the past 60 years. For people whose instincts about economic and political conflicts between unions and big business were honed more than a decade ago, it’s time to update your understanding.
According to newly released American National Election Studies (ANES) data from late 2024, analyzed and reported here for the first time, Americans feel more positively toward labor unions and more negatively toward big business than any time since ANES began asking the question in 1964. Using consistent methods to allow comparability over time, ANES uses representative samples of Americans and asks them to rate their feelings toward labor unions and big business on a 0–100 scale.
Progress on paid leave in the South: New state parental leave policies are a small but welcome step toward comprehensive paid leave for all Southern workers
While still lagging the rest of the country regarding workers’ access to paid leave, several states in the South—including Alabama and Mississippi this year—have begun to take the small but welcome step of ensuring paid parental leave to some public employees. While these laws cover only certain groups of workers and solely provide the paid parental portion of Paid Family and Medical Leave, they nevertheless represent an important step toward achieving more comprehensive paid leave access across the South. Read more
