Trump’s Department of Labor Continues Its Onslaught against Workers

Flurry of rule roll-backs hurt workers

By Century Foundation staff Julie Su, Senior Fellow; Rachel West, Senior Fellow and Andrew Stettner, Director of Economy and Jobs

The Trump administration is doubling down on the president and his Department of Labor’s (DOL) deep hostility toward workers. 

Over the past six months, Donald Trump, his inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency (whose efforts to cut the federal budget by $2 trillion was a colossal failure and which reversed itself on many occasions, actions that cost more than they saved), his union-busting cronies, and his Department of Labor leadership have actively—and in many cases illegally—cut funds for programs that support workers, worker organizing, worker safety, and job training. 

Trump’s DOL has reversed commitments to states to build an effective unemployment insurance system; undercut its own ability to fight wage theft, international worker exploitation, and discrimination; and actively dismantled the department from the inside by slashing 20 percent of its staff.

Just before the July 4 holiday—as the nation was focused on Republicans’ efforts to pass the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid and food assistance—Trump’s DOL issued a new barrage of attacks on workers, promising to turn a blind eye to stolen wages, safety violations, and corporate overreach. 

In total, the DOL announced sixty-four regulatory actions, the vast majority of which would reverse critical standards that ensure workers get a just day’s pay and come home healthy and safe (see Table 1 and Appendix). 

These actions would put the lives of workers across the economy at risk, deprive millions more of minimum wage and overtime protections, and sanction discrimination against workers of color, women, and workers with disabilities. 

At a time of rising prices, increased economic anxiety, and heightened dangers from climate change, the DOL should be doubling down on its mandate to protect and empower workers. Instead, the Trump administration is making workers more vulnerable to abuse and less safe on the job.

This factsheet highlights just some of the key deregulatory actions that will harm workers, identifying those that are particularly important to push back on through notice and comment procedures where available.

Putting workers in harm’s way by eroding the DOL’s health and safety authority.

1. Exposing workers to extreme heat.

Each year, an estimated 600 workers die from heat-related causes on the job, and nearly 25,000 others sustain illnesses and injuries related to extreme heat. As workers bake in another summer of record-breaking temperatures, the Trump administration has stalled action on new heat protections proposed by the Biden administration that would shield 36 million workers from life-threatening illnesses such as heat stroke. 

At the same time as it is putting heat protections on ice, Trump’s DOL is proposing to change the general duty clause, which requires employers to protect workers from known hazards. The general duty clause works as a safety net to put the responsibility on employers to keep workers safe from obvious dangers. 

One would expect that a DOL that puts American workers first would want to step up and be even more involved in preventing those in “inherently dangerous” jobs from workplace injury or death. Not the Trump administration: Trump’s DOL seeks to narrow the general duty clause so workers, such as those in the entertainment industry, would bear the risk of injury on the job. And since explicitly stripping some workers of protection isn’t enough, the DOL is further crowdsourcing corporate input on what additional jobs should be excluded from the full protections of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act. 

2. Threatening miners’ health and safety.

Since Trump took office, miners’ unions and mining communities have been under siege. The DOL’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) was created out of a recognition that miners face particular risks on the job and that the federal government has a critical role to play in ensuring their safety, enforcing standards, and saving lives. 

The Biden administration put in place a rule to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure, a rule forty years in the making. 

The Trump administration swept those protections aside in April and made clear how little it valued miner safety with its announcement that they would not enforce the standard. 

The Trump administration also pursued mass layoffs at the National Institute for Occupational Safety Health (NIOSH), which is responsible for monitoring black lung disease and other fatal conditions and moved to close thirty-four MSHA district offices. After an uproar led them to reverse course on the office closures, the administration has now proposed to weaken those district offices’ ability to impose safety requirements related to roof falls, mine explosions, and exposure to respirable dust that includes toxic silica. 

Sadly, history tells us that when mine operators fail to adequately ventilate and provide enough roof support, it is miners themselves who pay the ultimate price. The administration is also seeking to weaken MSHA’s ability to ensure miners, operating engineers, and other tradespeople who work on mine sites receive adequate training to stay safe on the job. 

Attacking the most vulnerable and exploited workers.

3. Relegating workers with disabilities to a lifetime of poverty work.

The DOL is most needed when it comes to workers who face the greatest vulnerabilities, including those who are most likely to be excluded from job opportunities and most likely to be exploited on the job. That’s why under the Biden administration, the DOL proposed a rule to end the sub-minimum wage for workers with disabilities.

Fifteen states have already banned this practice, and the number of disabled workers earning less than minimum wage has shrunk significantly since 2001. With competitive integrated employment, anti-discrimination protections, and other advances in policies that give people with disabilities a chance to show what they can really do, employment for people with disabilities has steadily increased, reaching record highs under the Biden administration. 

Now, the Trump administration has turned its back on American workers who need it the most and crushed the hopes of thousands of workers and job seekers with disabilities by withdrawing that rule and relegating workers with disabilities to jobs that pay as little as pennies per hour. Trump’s DOL will perpetuate discriminatory sub-minimum wages, which allow employers to place disabled workers in low-paying jobs in segregated workplaces. 

4. Cutting home health care workers’ wages to below $7.25 an hour.

The Trump administration is slashing the wages of millions of people who work in home-care jobs. Nearly 10 million older adults and disabled people rely on professional caregivers in their homes to manage their daily activities or support their ability to work. As our population ages, the need for home-care workers is growing every day—but low wages and poor working conditions have led to large, persistent staffing shortages in this sector. 

In 2013, the DOL made it clear that home health and personal aides who work for businesses that assign them to work providing one-on-one care in people’s homes must abide by the minimum wage and overtime laws in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Even with these protections, the median pay for home health aides and personal aides was only $16.78 an hour in 2024. 

Now, the Trump administration is proposing to reverse this policy, stripping millions of workers—the vast majority of whom are women, and disproportionately women ages 55 or older—of critical minimum wage and overtime protections, allowing employers to pay them less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. 

5. Ripping protections away from farmworkers.

Agricultural workers are among the lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers in the nation. That includes the nearly 350,000 temporary foreign workers who come to the United States each year through the H-2A visa program. Now, the Trump administration is moving to make it easier for unscrupulous employers to exploit farmworkers by overturning badly needed reforms to the H-2A program finalized in 2024. 

These reforms protected the rights of farmworkers in the H-2A program to speak out individually and collectively against mistreatment and prevented employers from arbitrarily firing them from their jobs. By reversing these reforms, the Trump administration is also making it harder to disqualify corrupt recruiters who charge illegal fees to workers to participate in the program. 

Stripping workers of protections doesn’t only harm workers in the H-2A program—it undercuts the working conditions and wages for all farmworkers in the United States. Combined with the administration’s horrifying attacks on immigrant workers, this move is a transparent effort to further strip workers of basic protections even as the DOL expects to dramatically increase the use of H-2A visas. 

Trump’s DOL is doing its part, unwittingly or intentionally, to prove that this administration’s hostility to immigrants was never limited to the undocumented. This is a recipe for disaster for these hardworking farmworkers. 

Eroding protections that prevent discrimination in the job market.

6. Nailing the coffin shut on anti-discrimination protections for federal contractors.

On his first day in office, President Trump rescinded Executive Order 11246, the seminal 1965 order that ensured workers whose employers do business with the federal government are not discriminated against based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. 

Now, DOL proposes to codify this retrenchment by permanently eliminating the requirement that federal contractors ensure their employment practices are not discriminatory. One of the most effective ways federal contractors have complied with this requirement was proactive advertising of jobs in all communities and affirmative action plans that helped ensure the federally funded workforce reflects the diversity of our nation. 

Trump’s DOL is also targeting workers with disabilities in more ways than one, including by gutting the requirement that federal contractors “take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment qualified individuals with disabilities.” Under new rules, federal contractors would no longer be required to collect data critical to identifying barriers to employment, presumably because it’s easier to claim discrimination doesn’t exist if you no longer track evidence of it. 

7. Undermining the right of jobseekers to high-quality job placement services.

The DOL has proposed no longer requiring that Employment Services offices in the states, which help unemployed and underemployed workers find new job opportunities, be staffed by government workers hired through merit staffing. Merit staffing ensures that employment services are delivered free of discrimination so that all individuals who walk into a career center receive unbiased job placement and training referrals—not delivered by for-profit contracting companies that are focused on their bottom lines.

Turning the DOL’s back on workers.

The Trump administration is undermining the DOL’s ability to carry out the mandates by Congress to protect workers through regulations. The vast majority of employers in the United States faithfully comply with these rules, implementing critical controls and operational policies that ensure a just day’s pay for workers and a safe return home. 

Standards against discrimination have opened the doors of opportunities to those who would otherwise have been overlooked, allowing the United States to benefit from the full talent of our people and giving all a chance to experience the fulfillment and sense of purpose that comes with having a good job. Transparent, thoughtful rulemaking is a fundamental responsibility of government, one that seeks to balance the needs of employers and workers.

Trump’s recently announced deregulatory agenda rejects this responsibility in its entirety, and shows his true colors as an anti-worker president. With each new action, the Trump administration exposes itself for what it is: hostile to the needs of America’s workers and willing to use every means to turn the clock back on the progress made to advance workers’ rights. 

Its latest announcement of upcoming rules is a corporate wish list of dangerous wage-cutting, discrimination-promoting, anti-opportunity, and injury-inducing actions that take a torch to hard-won worker protections. The Make America Great Again for Exploitation crowd may cheer, but the rest of us can’t let it happen.

Appendix: Regulatory Actions by Trump’s Department of Labor, July 2025.

Julie Su, Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where she works on a range of issues focused on protecting labor rights, growing worker power, and advancing equity in the economy. 

Rachel West, Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, most recently having served as special assistant to the president for labor and workers at the White House Domestic Policy Council, where she led efforts to strengthen workers’ pay and overtime protections, advance health and safety protections, and strengthen workplace rights. 

Andrew Stettner, Director of Economy and Jobs at The Century Foundation. He leads TCF’s team working on unemployment insurance, workforce development, labor rights, disability and the economy.