Deals and People April 20, 2026

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer Steps Down

Chavez-DeRemer becomes the third Trump Cabinet member to depart this year.

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Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned from her post Monday, as confirmed by White House communications director Steven Cheung. He said in a post on the social media platform X that Chavez-DeRemer will “take a position in the private sector.” Her departure comes as the Department of Labor and its Employee Benefits Security Administration have been busy with projects that affect the retirement industry.

Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling will be acting secretary, according to Cheung’s post. In his role, Sonderling has at the same time been the DOL’s chief operating officer overseeing the agency’s $14 billion dollar budget and 16,000 employees, according to his DOL biography.

The Department of Labor’s inspector general had been conducting an internal investigation of Chavez-DeRemer since January, as first reported by the New York Post, over reported allegations of misconduct.

Pro-Business Moves

Chavez-DeRemer’s departure occurred three weeks after the DOL released a proposed rule designed to provide a safe harbor for fiduciaries on how they could expand investment menus to include private investments in defined contribution retirement plans, written in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order in August 2025 encouraging the retirement industry’s expansion into private markets.  

The second Latina to hold the position of labor secretary after Hilda Solis, Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure was marked by an overarching effort to overturn the Biden administration’s regulations for retirement and benefit plans governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, including: 
  • The 2024 fiduciary rule, which the DOL initially stopped defending in court in 2025 and was then vacated in court in March 2026;  
  • A 2021 statement that warned about private investments in retirement accounts, which was subsequently replaced with the DOL’s 2026 proposed rule; 
  • Dropping support of plaintiffs in certain ERISA fiduciary duty lawsuits, with the DOL filing four amicus briefs between July 2025 and February 2026 that backed the employers. 

Chavez-DeRemer, who was confirmed by a 67-32 Senate vote in March 2025, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022 and represented her Oregon district for one term. Sonderling, who was also confirmed by the Senate in March 2025, is not new to the federal government or the DOL. He was Commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from September 2020 until August 2024 and had served as the Acting and Deputy Administrator of the department’s Wage and Hour Division from 2017 to 2020.

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Shortly after losing her re-election bid, Chavez-DeRemer received her Cabinet nomination from President-elect Trump in November 2024.

Trump has also fired two female Cabinet members: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5 and Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2.

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