Labor secretary steps down amid internal investigation

Lori Chavez-DeRemer, President Donald Trump’s embattled labor secretary, stepped down Monday as multiple scandals and investigations closed in on her.

“Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector,” Steven Cheung, a White House spokesperson, posted on social media. He said Keith Sonderling, the deputy secretary of labor, would serve as acting secretary.

Pressure on Chavez-DeRemer had mounted in recent weeks, as investigators and congressional leaders homed in on questions about her conduct in office, and that of her aides and members of her family.

The Labor Department’s inspector general’s office is nearing the end of a monthslong investigation into a whistleblower’s allegations of professional misconduct by Chavez-DeRemer and her closest aides. The claims include that she was having an affair with a member of her security team and used department resources for personal trips. Chavez-DeRemer was expected to be interviewed in the matter in the coming days.

Investigators spoke with several dozen witnesses, and uncovered evidence that Chavez-DeRemer and her staff abused federal spending limits on personal trips, several people familiar with the investigation said, including on fancy hotels, SUV rentals and meals. Four people have left or been forced out of their jobs in connection with the investigation.

Investigators had also reviewed text messages sent to young staff members by Chavez-DeRemer, her former deputy chief of staff, her husband and her father. The messages, reported last week by The New York Times, suggested that the secretary was drinking during the workday and raised questions about professionalism with her staff.

Nick Oberheiden, a lawyer representing Chavez-DeRemer in the internal investigation, said Monday that she “did not resign because she violated the law; no such finding exists.”

In a post on the social media platform X, Chavez-DeRemer said that she was honored to have served under the president.

The likelihood that the inspector general’s investigation would reveal embarrassing details was compounded by a parallel inquiry on Capitol Hill: Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, demanded internal records and statements from the department in connection with the allegations.

And Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, has been barred from the department’s headquarters, after female staff members accused him of making unwanted sexual advances, including filing a police report.

Although police and prosecutors have said they would not bring criminal charges against him, the situation continued to reverberate in the secretary’s office. In recent weeks, three claims of a hostile work environment were filed against Lori Chavez-DeRemer with the department’s civil rights office.

Sonderling, a labor lawyer with a decade of government experience, has been effectively leading the Labor Department during Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure, multiple employees told the Times.

Chavez-DeRemer, 58, a one-term former Republican member of Congress from Oregon, was nominated to the secretary position with backing from the Teamsters union, whose president, Sean O’Brien, supported Trump’s 2024 run.

Cheung said Monday that Chavez-DeRemer had “done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives.”

But her leadership left many Labor Department employees frustrated and demoralized, including career staff and political appointees. In interviews with the Times, dozens described a toxic workplace characterized by an absentee secretary and hostile aides.

The inspector general’s investigation was touched off by an internal complaint, first reported in January by The New York Post, that Chavez-DeRemer was having an affair with a subordinate and that she and her top aides regularly concocted official trips to destinations where Chavez-DeRemer could socialize and see family.

The evidence gathered in the inspector general’s investigation, along with the related police report and civil rights complaints, painted a picture of an executive office in which younger female staff members often fielded inappropriate requests and messages from Chavez-DeRemer, her family and her close aides. Young women in the executive office were also instructed to “pay attention” to the secretary’s husband and father, people familiar with the matter said.

In one 2025 text message exchange reviewed by the Times, a female staff member apologized to Shawn DeRemer for not being in touch, and promised to check in.

“You better,” DeRemer, an anesthesiologist, responded. “I was feeling forgotten. I figured you were still in church repenting after your exposure to the demon state of Oregon.”

In another exchange, Lori Chavez-DeRemer asked a staff member to bring her a bottle of “josh Sauvi B,” a reference to white wine, to her hotel room from the hotel bar while they were on a work trip.

Many in the department -- and in Washington more broadly -- sensed that her days as secretary were numbered, with the specter of potentially embarrassing details emerging in an investigative report.

Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation was reported earlier Monday by Notus.

On Monday, senators arriving on Capitol Hill for the first vote of the week responded to the news of her departure.

“The secretary demonstrated a lot of wisdom in resigning, and I think she read the room,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said senators, who will vote to confirm her replacement, needed to do a better job vetting Trump administration nominees. “I think what we have to do is anywhere where benefit of the doubt was given in the past, you’ve got to doubt,” he said.

Chavez-DeRemer led the department during a period in which the labor market weakened but proved surprisingly resilient.

Job growth has slowed to a crawl in recent months, wage growth has slowed and the unemployment rate has ticked up gradually. Younger workers, in particular, have struggled to gain a foothold in the labor market, and Americans have become increasingly concerned about the threat that artificial intelligence could pose to their career prospects.

Yet layoffs across the economy remain historically low, and many economists say weak hiring has more to do with a lack of supply -- in part because of Trump’s crackdown on immigration -- than a lack of demand from employers. Economists describe the labor market with words like “stagnant” and “anemic,” but not necessarily weak.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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