Trump and DOGE Jeopardize the Fight for Fairer Trade
For decades, Congress has authorized funding for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) within the Department of Labor. Through technical support, research, and monitoring, ILAB works to strengthen global labor standards, enforce labor commitments among trading partners, and combat international child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking.
ILAB helps counter the “race to the bottom” — because when workers abroad can earn a living wage with dignity, corporations have less incentive to offshore jobs and undercut U.S. workers’ bargaining.
In March 2025, despite Trump’s claims of wanting trade deals to benefit workers, in one fell swoop, his administration terminated all of ILAB’s cooperative agreements to support international labor rights projects. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) made clear that the regime would not spend the funds that Congress specifically appropriated to combat unfair labor practices and to support workers’ rights abroad.
To make matters worse, ILAB lost substantial capacity through the mass resignation of staff who, following the project cuts, took an administration buyout offer. And there is substantial concern that, through 2026 appropriations, ILAB could lose even more staff with the capacity and expertise to hold our trade partners accountable.
As more than 70 members of Congress recently noted, this further gutting would, among other things, put at risk the labor advancements of Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA, now called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Through the novel Rapid Response Labor Mechanism (RRM), ILAB has taken labor enforcement actions and worked to ensure compliance of our USMCA partners, especially Mexico, with the commitments of the agreement.”
The RRM is a provision that unions and congressional Democrats forced Trump to add to the USMCA, but it has since received broad bipartisan support. The RRM allows workers’ organizations to petition the U.S. or Canadian government with respect to specific abuses in specific factories in Mexico for denying collective bargaining rights. It allows for punishments (tariffs) to be levied against individual facilities found in violation rather than against an entire category of goods.
The RRM has led to re-hiring or backpay for more than 36,000 Mexican workers. By putting this program at risk, Trump is abandoning the best (though far-from-perfect) element of his signature trade agreement, failing workers at home and abroad.
Public Citizen — on behalf of ILAB grantees the Solidarity Center, Global March Against Child Labour, and the American Institutes for Research — has filed a lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful termination of cooperative agreements supported by ILAB funding. This case is ongoing.