Lori Chavez-DeRemer, President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, is resigning from her position amid professional misconduct allegations, becoming the third Cabinet member to depart during Trump’s second term.
White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on X on Monday that Chavez-DeRemer would leave the Cabinet to take a position in the private sector, though he did not say where she was going. Cheung said the deputy labor secretary, Keith Sonderling, would become the acting head of the agency.
Accusations that Chavez-DeRemer had engaged in misconduct, including personal travel during taxpayer-funded trips, surfaced in a complaint filed with the Labor Department’s inspector general that was first reported by the New York Post. The complaint led to the suspension of several top aides and surfaced sexual misconduct allegations against Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, Shawn DeRemer.
Chavez-DeRemer, in her own post, wrote on X: “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve in this historic Administration and work for the greatest President of my lifetime.” She said that she is “looking forward to what the future has in store as I depart for the private sector.”
The Labor Department referred The Post to Chavez-DeRemer’s post on X. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation follows a New York Times report from last week that she and her top aides, as well as her father and husband, sent personal messages to young staffers, which has been under investigation by Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito. The outlet also reported that Chavez-DeRemer and her aide asked employees to bring them wine during work trips.
D’Esposito told his employees in an email after news of the investigation broke that the office “takes all allegations of fraud, waste, abuse and misconduct seriously” and that the complaint against Chavez-DeRemer “was likely to be of interest to our many stakeholders.”
Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation marks the latest shake-up in Trump’s Cabinet since he retook the White House in January 2025. Trump ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi in April about one month after removing Kristi L. Noem from her post as homeland security secretary. Overall, though, the president, who has been eager to avoid the Cabinet chaos of his first four years in office, has surrounded himself in his second term mainly by loyalists who do not challenge him.
By many accounts, Chavez-DeRemer had shown fierce loyalty to the president and his agenda, installing a massive banner of Trump’s face on the side of the agency’s Washington headquarters in the fall. She invited him to see his “beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.”
Chavez-DeRemer had also sought to further the administration’s immigration enforcement priorities by embarking on a campaign to root out alleged misuse of a highly skilled visa program and launching a social media campaign that depicts a nearly all-White workforce.
Trump has in recent months defended Chavez-DeRemer, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in January that Trump thought she was “doing a tremendous job at the Department of Labor on behalf of American workers.” After Noem and Bondi’s oustings, Trump has considered making more changes to his administration’s leadership, though White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Post that Chavez-DeRemer was a “patriot” who has Trump’s “full confidence.”
Chavez-DeRemer’s attorney Nick Oberheiden said that his client had resigned but that it did “not result from legal wrongdoings.”
“Secretary Chavez-DeRemer has made the decision to step down from her role in order to best serve the interests of the American people and ensure that the important work of the Department of Labor continues without distraction,” Oberheiden said in a statement.
During her tenure as labor secretary, Chavez-DeRemer had largely been on the road, according to business lobbyists and agency staffers. In March, she completed a 50-state “America at Work” tour where she has met with workers, employers and union members.
Her deputy, Sonderling, a longtime ally of business leaders now leading the agency, had already been directing policy and personnel-related decision-making in Washington, they said.
Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination to run a cabinet-level agency marked an unusual nod for the labor movement. She is a moderate Republican who had served on bipartisan congressional caucuses and supported pro-union legislation. Her nomination was opposed by many business leaders. But Chavez-DeRemer tempered her backing of pro-union legislation in her confirmation hearing, and ultimately received bipartisan support from the Senate, with a push from the Teamsters union, which also lobbied Trump.
Since Chavez-DeRemer’s Senate confirmation in 2025, the business community in Washington has been largely pleased with the Labor Department’s direction. In particular, business leaders have praised the department’s emphasis on deregulation, investments in apprenticeships and guidance in the form of opinion letters on how laws apply to specific workplaces.
However, Chavez-DeRemer’s relationship with labor unions has been strained. Labor advocates say the administration, especially during the U.S. DOGE Service’s cutting of regulations, dismantled key workplace protections. And many labor leaders in Washington have had minimal contact with Chavez-DeRemer, including the president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions. The two last spoke a year ago, at a meeting about DOGE’s cuts to the agency.
One outlier has been the Teamsters union. The union’s president, Sean O’Brien, recently said his office maintains a personal relationship with the labor secretary, and a union spokesperson said she has been “the most engaged Labor Secretary we’ve had under a Republican administration.” That relationship had been seen as useful for Trump’s coalition in securing working-class support for Republicans in future elections.
Employees within the department’s headquarters said that Chavez-DeRemer had been noticeably less present in the building than past secretaries, according to three employees within the department’s headquarters who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been granted permission to speak to media. She had not held an all-hands meeting and does not share her schedule with staffers as her predecessors did, they said.
Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana), whose tough questioning of Noem during a committee hearing helped lead Trump to oust her last month, said he thought Chavez-DeRemer was right to step down.
“I think the secretary demonstrated a lot of wisdom in resigning, and I think she read the room,” Kennedy told reporters.
Chavez-DeRemer was confirmed by a wider margin last year than most of Trump’s cabinet members; 17 Senate Democrats joined Republicans in voting to confirm her. (Two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), voted against her.)
Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.
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