Keith Sonderling — a former U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner and President Donald Trump’s current nominee for deputy secretary of labor — faced a range of questions Thursday as members of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee sought to determine not only his views on labor questions, but also the extent of his involvement with the agency’s transformation by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
Before kicking off his questions, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., welcomed Sonderling and his family to the hearing. But everything after that was tough love.
Unlike the case of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who scored a 14-9 vote of confidence from the HELP Committee earlier Thursday morning, few Senators let today’s nominee skate by with excuses of not being in the building yet.
Experience at the agency didn’t work in Sonderling’s favor
Acknowledging that Keith Sonderling was a senior advisor to the acting DOL secretary, Kaine asked the deputy secretary nominee, “How many Department of Labor employees have lost their jobs since the beginning of the Trump administration?”
“I am a senior advisor right now at the U.S. Department of Labor. I don’t have the authority over hiring and firing decisions,” Sonderling said.
“Do you not know the answer?”
“I do not know,” Sonderling said, before intimating the assistant secretary of management or the HR staff at the department would likely know.
“Is the answer to my question one that you’re interested in or disinterested in?” Kaine asked.
Sonderling started, “If confirmed as deputy secretary of labor—,” but Kaine interrupted him, re-emphasizing that the deputy secretary nominee works at the DOL “now. You’re there right now.”
“I don’t have the authority over HR, but I will,” Sonderling said, agreeing that his interest in protecting workers’ rights extended to “every worker in the United States.”
The exchange was unremarkable, in that it was a classic display of Democrats’ rapid-fire questioning Donald Trump’s DOL nominees this month. But it was the beginning of Sonderling’s recurrent grilling over fired workers and whether the senior advisor had any culpability in the vast reduction of head count.
Sonderling pressed briefly on independent contractor, joint employer rules
Earlier in the hearing, HELP Committee Chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., had used his time to question Sonderling about the back-and-forth interpretation of independent contractor status. “As deputy secretary, do you commit to re-implementing the independent contractor standard used in the first Trump administration, so workers are free to earn a living in a way that works best for them?”
Sonderling answered that the independent contractor rule is currently under litigation. “If confirmed, I will certainly work with the solicitors and the department to ensure the best path forward,” he said. “I do have a very strong record on this and what we did in the first Trump administration, I, of course, stand by. Because based on long-standing legal principles, we did not make up a new standard.”
Under the Trump administration, Sonderling noted, DOL adhered to “standards that the Supreme Court has blessed before,” he said.
Taking shots at the previous leaders — “The Biden-Harris administration made a number of attempts to benefit union constituencies, including by implementing rules that increase corporate control over small businesses” — Cassidy pointed out that Sonderling had previously signed the Trump administration’s joint employer rule “refocusing on who actually directs an employee’s work day to day.”
Cassidy asked if the Trump-era rule would be re-implemented.
“If I'm lucky enough to be confirmed, I'm committed to looking at all the rules and regulation[s],” Sonderling said, adding that while the joint-employer rule Cassidy referenced is “not under litigation [...] that is something we’re going to take a look at very closely.”
In another era, Sonderling’s commitments to clarify the agency’s stance on independent contractor and joint employer interpretation may have been the most salient topics of the labor discussion.
But over the next hour, these tidbits were overshadowed by bipartisan concerns over the Department of Government Efficiency and its actions at DOL.
Bipartisan concerns over DOGE mount
As was the case with many Republicans present, the conversation with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, started jovially. (She and Sonderling noted they’d previously spoken at length about fish, apparently in the context of seafood-related labor issues in Alaska.)
Still, Murkwoski echoed the worry of Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., regarding DOGE’s access to sensitive DOL data.
“Know that this senator shares the concern about confidentiality of that,” said Murkowski.
“As I’m talking to Alaskans, one of the concerns I’m hearing is we don’t know why there are those who are gaining access. It may be fine, it may be not — but I’m nervous about it,” she continued. “I think that we can alleviate anxiety and nervousness by just saying your sensitive data is going to remain confidential.”
Ultimately, Murkowksi didn’t push Sonderling on it, but ended by saying she “just wanted to put [her concern] out there on the record” before moving on to discuss apprenticeships.
Claiming ignorance didn’t work in Sonderling’s favor, either
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., told Sonderling that she was growing “more and more concerned” throughout the hearing at how the nominee dodged questions about employers discriminating without recourse, and the place of veterans and people with disabilities in an anti-DEI society.
Circling back to Kaine’s earlier line of questioning about firing federal workers, Blunt Rochester said, “While I was sitting here, [I] did a Google search and found, on Bloomberg Law, information about how many employees from the Department of Labor were let go.” She went on to ask how Sonderling would support the American workforce, while firing government employees — including those at DOL.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., next contrasted Sonderling’s “deep respect for civil servants” against her view that “this administration continues to attack these workers.” She spoke about how Elon Musk’s email demanding to know how workers spent their week caused government-wide “chaos, confusion and fear” for federal employees, including DOL staff.
“I would like to know who was involved in making decisions at the department regarding the guidance that was given to department employees,” she asked.
Directives from the Office of Personnel Management, including “the guidance related to responding to emails or not,” Sonderling said, is the work of the agency’s HR department.
“How is it possible that you weren’t involved in such a high-level decision as a person who’s a senior part of the transition team? You’ve been there in the building; you have been a part of the landing team,” Alsobrooks asked. “How is it possible that you weren't involved?”
“It is a large agency, and there’s professional career staff that handle various aspects of the department,” Sonderling said. “The specific questions you’re asking about go to the professional staff and the human resources divisions, which I don’t manage and I don’t have authority over, and I trust them fully.”
In a surreal moment, Sonderling noted that he himself received one of the emails, which he realized only after reading about it on social media.
“Which I think again points to the sheer incompetence — to even send that email to you says something horrible about the people in the building,” Alsobrooks said, summing up senators’ recurring aversion to DOGE throughout the hearing.
