From the Labor Department to the Strip Club: The Disgraceful Saga of Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Lori Chavez-DeRemer lasted exactly one year as U.S. Secretary of Labor. In that time, she managed to accumulate a scandal portfolio so exhaustive it reads like a case study in how the powerful exploit public office for private gratification — at taxpayer expense, no less.

Drinking on the job. Extramarital affairs with subordinates. Strip club visits on official trips. Fabricating government travel to fund personal vacations. Using federal staffers as personal servants. And then there's the family dimension — instructing young female employees to "pay attention" to her husband and father, both of whom exchanged inappropriate text messages with junior staff, with at least two women reporting that her husband inappropriately touched them.

Chavez-DeRemer resigned on April 20, 2026 — the third Trump Cabinet member to leave in two months. But unlike Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who were pushed out for political failures, Chavez-DeRemer earned her exit the old-fashioned way: sheer, sustained corruption.

A Cabinet-Level Drunk

According to the Labor Department's own inspector general — an independent, nonpartisan watchdog — Chavez-DeRemer kept a stash of champagne, bourbon, and Kahlua in her office and drank during the workday. This wasn't occasional. This was routine.

On a 2025 official trip to Portland, Oregon — the state she once represented in Congress — the Labor Secretary celebrated the conclusion of a "work week" by taking a group of subordinates to Angels PDX, a Southeast Portland strip club with a history as colorful as its clientele. (The building previously housed Tommy's Too, a club placed under federal investigation for prostitution and money laundering, and whose owner was shot and killed in the parking lot in 2014.)

This was a month into the job.

Travel Fraud: Vacations on the Taxpayer Dime

The drinking and the strip clubs were the flashy scandals. The systemic corruption was quieter.

Chavez-DeRemer directed her chief of staff Jihun Han and deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright to fabricate official government trips — inventing business justifications so she could visit friends and family at taxpayer expense. Over her tenure, she visited 37 states on more than 50 official trips, often spending the vast majority of her time on personal business after a cursory hour of official appearances.

She visited 37 states in 12 months — and the Labor Department got precious little in return.

It wasn't new behavior. During her failed 2024 reelection campaign for Congress, Chavez-DeRemer spent over $56,000 of campaign funds on luxury hotels and resorts across the country, plus another $4,345 on limo and chauffeur services.

The Frances Perkins Building, U.S. Department of Labor headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Personal Errands — On the Government Clock

Staffers reported being treated like household help. Chavez-DeRemer allegedly had aides clean out her closets, run personal errands, and bring bottles of wine to her hotel room — all while on official government travel. Her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff were accused of belittling and bullying junior employees who pushed back.

The Husband, the Father, and the Young Women

And then there's the dimension that makes this story genuinely stomach-turning.

Chavez-DeRemer's husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, was banned from the Labor Department's headquarters after at least two female staffers reported that he inappropriately touched them. DC police, the Federal Protective Service, and a federal prosecutor all declined to pursue charges — because of course they didn't.

But it gets worse. The New York Times revealed that both Shawn DeRemer and Chavez-DeRemer's father, retired Teamster Richard Chavez, exchanged text messages with young female members of the secretary's staff. The elder Chavez went further — texting a staffer and asking her to keep his messages private, a detail that speaks volumes about his awareness that what he was doing was wrong.

Chavez-DeRemer and her deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright allegedly instructed young female employees to "pay attention" to both men. Read that again. The Secretary of Labor — the person nominally responsible for protecting American workers, including women — was reportedly directing her female staff to humor the inappropriate advances of her husband and her father.

The Metropolitan Police investigated an incident at the Labor Department's building in December 2025, believed connected to the husband's conduct.

A Political Crony From the Start

None of this happened in a vacuum. Chavez-DeRemer was recommended to Trump's cabinet by Teamsters President Sean O'Brien and his friend, Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin (now Secretary of Homeland Security). O'Brien earned Trump's favor after the Teamsters stayed neutral in the 2024 election and he spoke at the Republican convention, calling Trump "one tough SOB."

In her February 2025 confirmation hearing, Chavez-DeRemer renounced her previous cosponsorship of the PRO Act — the landmark pro-union legislation she had once championed. The woman appointed to serve as a "bridge" between the Trump administration and organized labor didn't even make it through her hearing before abandoning labor's top legislative priority.

And while all of this was happening, her department was quietly working to eliminate rules requiring minimum wage and overtime pay for home care workers and seat belts for agricultural workers being transported by employers. She supported the elimination of Job Corps and the Labor Department's Women's Bureau — the office literally dedicated to promoting the welfare of wage-earning women.

The woman who allegedly pressured her female staff to tolerate sexual harassment from her family members was simultaneously trying to abolish the agency designed to protect working women.

The Fallout

Four Labor Department officials were forced out as the investigation widened: chief of staff Jihun Han, deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright, bodyguard Brian Sloan (with whom Chavez-DeRemer allegedly had an affair), and director of advance Melissa Robey, who was fired for submitting excessive travel expenditures.

Chavez-DeRemer's departure was announced not by the president but by White House communications director Steven Cheung, who offered this remarkable assessment: "She has done a phenomenal job."

The secretary herself blamed the reporting on "high-ranked deep state actors who have been coordinating with the one-sided news media" — a defense that apparently convinced exactly no one, given that the initial leaks came from her own department's inspector general.

What This Tells Us

The Lori Chavez-DeRemer saga isn't just about one corrupt cabinet official. It's about a system that puts political loyalists in charge of agencies they have no intention of actually running. A system where a Labor Secretary spends 12 months jet-setting, drinking, and enabling her family's predation on young female employees — all while gutting the very worker protections her department is supposed to enforce.

It took the inspector general, the New York Post, and the New York Times — not congressional oversight or White House standards — to bring this to light. And even then, the administration called her performance "phenomenal."

Chavez-DeRemer is gone. The culture that produced her, and the system that protected her until it couldn't anymore, remains very much intact.

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Sources: Associated Press, New York Post, New York Times, NW Labor Press, Willamette Week, Washington Examiner, Bloomberg Law