When Donald Trump and his team were assembling their second-term Cabinet, former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer appeared to be one of their least controversial choices. The Oregon Republican, tapped to lead the Department of Labor, was ultimately confirmed with 67 votes, including more than a dozen Senate Democrats, which reflected fairly broad support in this Congress.
A year later, she resigned under a cloud of overlapping scandals. MS NOW reported:
Chavez-DeRemer resigned Monday after a tenure marked by sensational allegations that she had an affair with a security staffer and that her husband sexually assaulted her employees. … Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling will serve as acting labor secretary, according to [the White House’s Steven] Cheung. […]
It is unclear when Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation is effective. NOTUS first reported on her resignation.
The secretary’s resignation came just five days after The New York Times reported on a series of new allegations, including a string of incidents in which Chavez-DeRemer, her relatives and her top aides “routinely” sent personal messages and requests to young staff members. Those came on the heels of a related MS NOW report on Labor Department employees who had lodged formal workplace discrimination complaints against Chavez-DeRemer, “alleging she created a toxic workplace and sought to retaliate against women who reported her husband for sexual misconduct in her office.”
MS NOW’s report noted that two of the complaints were filed by young female staffers who alleged Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, “subjected them to unwanted sexual touching late last year when they were working at U.S. Department of Labor offices.”
A series of related allegations, reported by various outlets in recent months, claim that Chavez-DeRemer had “an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate” and engaged in travel fraud, and that the department barred her husband from entering the building.
The Labor Department, Chavez-DeRemer and her husband did not return MS NOW’s request for comment on its reporting, but lawyers for the couple previously denied allegations their clients had engaged in any sexual assault or inappropriate conduct.
The secretary was scheduled to be interviewed by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General in the coming days. Her resignation will cut short that ongoing investigation.
As the dust settles on the developments, there are a handful of elements to keep in mind.
1. Chavez-DeRemer is clinging to a conspiracy theory. In a written statement about her resignation, the outgoing secretary said, “The allegations against me, my family, and my team have been peddled by high-ranked deep state actors who have been coordinating with the one-sided news media and continue to undermine President Trump’s mission.”
In other words, Chavez-DeRemer wants to be seen as a victim, which is absurd given the nature of the allegations that forced her to quit.
2. Scandal-plagued women in the White House Cabinet aren’t faring well. On March 5, Trump removed then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, followed by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s firing on April 2. The president accepted Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation less than two weeks later. Taken together, it suggests scandal-plagued men in the White House Cabinet are faring far better than scandal-plagued colleagues who are women.
3. A period of instability has clearly begun. Through the first year of Trump’s second term, his team remained largely intact. That’s no longer the case: The president has not only lost three Cabinet secretaries over the course of roughly seven weeks, he also saw the departure of prominent figures such as Todd Lyons, who led Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Gregory Bovino, who helped lead the Border Patrol.
4. New faces probably won’t help. In American history, plenty of struggling presidents have shaken up their teams, ostensibly to demonstrate to the public that they’re open to changes in direction. But there’s no reason to assume Trump’s recent changes will help him in any way.
There’s a simple reason for that: His administration is plagued by dysfunction, corruption, incompetence and mismanagement, all of which stems not from secretaries and agency leaders who have made poor decisions, but from the president himself.
Hapless figures such as Noem, Bondi and Chavez-DeRemer deserved to go (as do many of their Cabinet colleagues), but those hoping their departures will lead to a more effective, more responsible administration need to lower their expectations.
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