The Department of Labor’s Faith Leader Is Now Also in Charge of Its Civil Rights Enforcement

The idiosyncratic leading the Department of Labor’s arguable monthly worship services has present taken implicit 1 of the agency’s astir important offices.

Kenneth Wolfe, the manager of the DOL’s religion center, is present besides starring the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the bureau tasked with making definite that national contractors comply with anti-discrimination laws. Wolfe’s assignment was softly announced earlier this month, aft the bureau released its projected 2027 fund successful April, which would destruct the bureau entirely.

Because it oversees national contractors, the OFCCP had jurisdiction implicit “roughly 20 to 25 percent of the American workforce,” says Keir Bickerstaffe, who served arsenic an lawyer with the DOL for 16 years earlier leaving astatine the extremity of erstwhile president Joe Biden’s word successful January 2025. The OFCCP employed labour economists and statistical experts who could analyse workforce information for discrimination, and its lawyers could instrumentality companies to court. “The OFCCP could get settlements connected behalf of an full people of people, it could question changes to institution policies and practices to destruct discrimination,” says Bickerstaffe.

For galore years, it was the agency’s superior mechanics for enforcing civilian rights laws.

Under President Donald Trump, however, the OFCCP has mislaid a important fig of employees to resignations and reductions successful force. In 1 of his archetypal acts successful 2025, Trump signed an enforcement bid titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which ordered each agencies to extremity each “diversity, equity, and inclusion” actions wrong authorities and “combat amerciable private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” This heavy blunted OFCCP’s enforcement abilities. Another enforcement bid signed successful March 2026, titled “Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors,” requires national contractors not to prosecute successful immoderate DEI activity.

The DOL’s caller projected fund for 2027 cites the 2025 DEI enforcement bid arsenic the crushed for eliminating the OFCCP, penning that it was “responsible for enforcing immoderate of these misguided activities, and transfers its remaining statutory programme areas to the recently created Office of Civil Rights.”

“The organizational consolidation is not a atrocious happening successful theory,” says a DOL worker who spoke to WIRED connected the information of anonymity for fearfulness of retaliation. “But it’s being done successful work of a wide docket that inverts the thought of civilian rights.”

The DOL did not respond to questions astir whether Wolfe volition person a enactment relation astatine the Office of Civil Rights erstwhile this consolidation happens.

According to his LinkedIn, Wolfe’s acquisition is chiefly successful communications. He antecedently served arsenic a speechwriter for a Republican congressman until 2003, earlier moving successful the bureau of communications astatine the Department of Health and Human Services. He doesn’t database immoderate ineligible experience, which was a reddish emblem to Bickerstaffe: “I judge each anterior OFCCP director, surely the ones I worked under, had a ineligible inheritance and specifically astatine slightest immoderate benignant of inheritance successful civilian rights law,” says the erstwhile DOL attorney.

The DOL did not respond to questions astir what qualifications Wolfe has to pb the office, oregon what his relation whitethorn beryllium successful its wind-down implicit the adjacent year.

Before assuming his caller role, Wolfe was 1 of respective religion halfway directors crossed authorities hosting monthly worship services. In 1 worship service, pastor Leon Benjamin, a erstwhile Republican legislature candidate, told employees that their occupation was “getting America to recognize that [work] is thing that God expects america to do.”

DOL employees who spoke to WIRED astatine the clip said that the worship services, which took spot during the workday, made them uncomfortable.

There is, apparently, 1 benignant of discrimination, however, that the DOL is inactive paying adjacent attraction to: In April, the bureau announced it would spouse with the Department of Justice to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” Earlier this year, the bureau released a instrumentality that summarizes each state’s laws regarding spiritual favoritism successful the workplace.