Members of the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau in 1946Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty
When the Secretary of the Department of Labor (DOL), Lori Chavez-DeRemer, testified before the House Appropriations Committee last month, she seemed to assure worried lawmakers that the more than century-old, congressionally-mandated Women’s Bureau was here to stay.
“The Women’s Bureau is in statute,” Chavez-DeRemer said in response to a question from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) about DOGE’s cancelations of congressionally-mandated grants designed to get women into jobs in construction and manufacturing, as Mother Jones previously reported. Indeed, the Women’s Bureau was created through a law enacted in 1920 to promote the welfare of women at work, improve their working conditions, and boost their abilities to earn good livings.
But a summary of the Labor Department’s budget request for the next fiscal year, released by the agency on Friday, shows the department is proposing to entirely eliminate the Women’s Bureau—which it calls “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past”—for the first time ever. The budget brief, a summary that agencies release detailing their annual budget requests, states that the DOL will work with Congress to repeal the statutes mandating the existence of the Women’s Bureau as well as the aforementioned grant program that was already canceled. President Donald Trump’s budget request to Congress, released Friday, also proposes eliminating the Bureau. The effort comes as Republicans’ latest attempt to dismantle the Bureau, which they started working towards during Trump’s first term.
Nine current and former DOL staffers told Mother Jones the move reflects the Trump administration’s ambitions to encourage more women to stop working and instead stay home to raise children. “It really feels like a specific [effort] to get women out of the workplace,” said Gayle Goldin, former deputy director of the office under the Biden administration. “We really still need the Women’s Bureau, because we need to be able to identify what the problems are, see where the barriers are for women in the workplace, and ensure that women have full capacity to enter the workplace in whatever job they want.”
Former staffers also say it reflects the Trump administration’s broader devaluing of issues primarily affecting women—despite Trump’s claims that “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE” in his second term. The DOL staffers, along with outside experts, say they fear that eliminating the Women’s Bureau will lead to a rollback of women’s gains in the workforce.
Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a DC think tank, disputes the DOL’s characterization of the Women’s Bureau as “a relic of the past,” pointing to data that shows the gender wage gap widened for the first time in 20 years post-pandemic and that women’s labor force participation rate has decreased since peaking in the 1990s.
“The Women’s Bureau has historically played a role in helping the [DOL] understand both the causes and consequences of economic trends like this, which can only be effectively addressed with timely research and policy analysis,” Bahn said.
Spokespeople for the Labor Department and the White House did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.
Multiple former DOL staffers described the Women’s Bureau as “small but mighty.”
Despite a relatively tiny budget that makes up less than one percent of the department’s overall spending, the Bureau has historically played a key role in passing federal laws including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. More recently, their research on state-level paid family and medical leave laws led multiple states to pass such laws, former DOL staffers said. Staff members also provided briefings to lawmakers in Congress based on their data to help inform policies to support women workers.
“It’s not something that is a household name,” Goldin, the former deputy director, said of the Bureau, “but it is something that really makes a difference to working women.”
Since its creation, the office has conducted regular research on women’s workforce participation by county, the gender wage gap by race and occupation, and child care prices nationwide. One former DOL employee described the Women’s Bureau staff as “that voice in rooms where no one was saying anything about working women..[and] asking, ‘What about childcare? What about paid leave? What about the gender wage gap?’” (Several current and former DOL staffers were granted anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out; a department official previously threatened staff who spoke to journalists with “serious legal consequences,” including criminal charges, ProPublica reported.)
The Bureau also administered grants to support job training and address gender-based harassment in the workplace, which grantees said offered critical support and helped women secure well-paying jobs. The office also hosted in-person training sessions nationwide to ensure workers knew their rights and to help other federal agencies implement programs to support women’s well-being and equity at work.
Wendy Chun-Hoon, former director of the Bureau under the Biden administration, said it’s “laughable” for the DOL to propose cutting an agency that manages to do so much with such a small budget. “Our dollar probably goes further than anyone else’s,” she said.
Since Trump’s second term began, the office’s work has essentially been at a standstill. The Bureau has lost about half of its approximately 50-person staff through a combination of buyouts and resignations. DOL staffers said the Bureau’s public-facing work—such as blog posts commemorating International Women’s Day and National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, new data analyses, and funding opportunities for employers—has essentially been paused since Jan. 20, leaving those who remain without much work to do. “There doesn’t seem to be much interest from the Secretary’s office so far in engaging with [the Bureau] and trying to see what [the Bureau] can do to enhance their priorities,” one DOL staffer said.
“The instructions that we got were essentially anything that had [the word] ‘gender’ had to come down.”
The little work that staffers have been assigned since Trump resumed office has been focused on appeasing the new administration. Soon after Trump’s Inauguration, Women’s Bureau staffers received what they believed was a bizarre directive, according to multiple current and former DOL staffers: Scrub the Women’s Bureau website of terms including “inequity,” “gender identity,” and in some cases simply “gender,” because they could run afoul of Trump’s executive orders seeking to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion across government and to erase transgender people from public life. One former Women’s Bureau staffer said there were multiple staff members working on the project full-time for two to three days. “The instructions that we got were essentially anything that had [the word] ‘gender’ had to come down,” the staffer said.
Some prior references to the gender wage gap were changed to refer to instead the “sex earnings gap.” And webpages that once housed extensive resources and reports on gender-based violence and harassment at work and the impacts of gender and racial inequalities affecting women workers were deleted entirely, which one former DOL staffer called “a huge loss.” (Archived versions of the webpages are still available through the Wayback Machine.)
In its attempt to justify eliminating the office, the budget brief claims that “the Women’s Bureau has struggled to find a role” as women’s workforce participation has increased since the office’s creation in 1920, and that “its work is not always closely coordinated with, or informed by, the agencies that actually have the resources to address the issues at hand.” But current and former DOL staffers say those allegations are baseless.
“We know full well that women’s labor force participation continues to be much lower than men’s,” one former DOL employee said. “Clearly there’s plenty more progress we could make.”
Staffers also noted examples of the Bureau’s work helping other federal agencies address the concerns of women workers: In 2022, for example, the office collaborated with the Department of Transportation to raise awareness of sexual harassment and assault in the trucking industry, and also worked with the Department of Commerce to require that companies seeking large amounts of funding through the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act submit proposals to make childcare accessible to workers.
“This administration came out saying that they were going to ‘defend women’ and that they were ‘pro-worker,’” said Chun-Hoon, the former director, “and they’ve demonstrated they’re anything but either of those things.”
Republicans have long been wary of the Women’s Bureau.
During Trump’s first term, the administration sought to slash its funding by more than 75 percent, though that did not end up happening because of pushback from advocacy groups and Democrats. And in 2023, House Republicans unsuccessfully tried to eliminate the Bureau for the first time in at least a decade.
While Project 2025 did not outright call for the elimination of the Women’s Bureau, it alleged the office “tends towards a politicized research and engagement agenda that puts predetermined conclusions ahead of empirical study” and said the Bureau should “rededicate its research budget towards open inquiry, especially to dissentangle the influences on women’s workforce participation and to understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.”
For supporters of the Women’s Bureau, a cruel irony is that Thursday marks the office’s 105th birthday. If it is, in fact, eliminated before it turns 106—which Congress would have to approve—one DOL staffer predicted that “women are going to be left behind.” For the Trump administration, though, that may be the goal.
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