Congressional budget amendment and new DOL wage rule together would greatly expand work visas for farmworkers and drastically lower their wages
This is Part 1 of a two-part series analyzing the impact of an amendment to the House Homeland appropriations bill on the H-2A and H-2B visa programs.
Key takeaways:
- The government funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security may include a rider amendment that would expand the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm jobs. This amendment (originally known as Amendment #1 but later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment) proposes to open the H-2A visa program to year-round occupations.
- There were 410,000 year-round jobs in agriculture and 353,000 seasonal H-2A workers in 2024.
- The Trump Department of Labor has issued a new 2026 H-2A Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) to set H-2A wages. Based on their own estimates, the 2026 H-2A AEWR will result in a $24 billion pay cut for H-2A farmworkers over 10 years and incentivize growth in the H-2A program to 500,000 jobs a year. EPI has estimated that U.S. farmworkers will lose $2.7 to 3.3 billion in wages per year.
- If employers are allowed to use H-2A visas for year-round jobs via the House Homeland appropriations rider, farmworkers in those jobs will see massive pay cuts of $20,000 to $40,000 per year, starting in 2026.
- The Trump DOL wage reductions combined with H-2A visas for year-round jobs could expand the H-2A program to 900,000 workers in 2034, meaning that workers on temporary visas would account for 42% of average annual employment in agriculture.
- This rider in Congress and the proposed regulation at DOL would only benefit farm employers, allowing them to hire workers they can control for as little pay as possible. These changes would drastically lower pay for all farmworkers and lead to job losses for U.S. workers, a complete reversal from the Trump administration’s original claims that U.S. workers would fill the farm jobs left open due to deportations.
For well over a decade now—time and time and time and time again—Congress has been making policy changes to temporary work visa programs not through the normal process of debating and passing legislation, but through a backdoor process. This involves amendments to annual appropriations legislation (known as “riders”) that fund the U.S. government. Riders that make policy changes are much more likely to pass without much public notice, debate, or pushback relative to dedicated legislation, since they are smaller parts of larger, must-pass legislation to fund the whole U.S. government. The significant changes proposed or passed in riders over the past decade have all pushed temporary work visa programs in the same direction: expanding and deregulating the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, which benefits employers at the expense of U.S. workers and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who will continue to see reduced wages and poorer working conditions. It’s already clear that low-wage work visa programs won’t be improved during the Trump administration; instead, they’ll be made much worse.
This fiscal year, there is a particular urgency around the riders to expand and deregulate the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, in light of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort that is arresting and deporting workers at a breakneck pace, as well as canceling temporary immigration protections that provided work authorization to millions. The Trump administration got the ball rolling on this effort with a new proposed H-2A wage regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) on October 2, 2025. This proposed regulation contains a stunning admission: The administration’s mass deportation effort is likely to raise food prices. DOL’s solution to this problem of the administration’s own creation is an irrational and anti-worker solution. Instead of pushing the administration from within to stop their campaign of mass deportation, DOL proposes to lower farmworker wages by $24 billion over the next 10 years.
Without today’s jobs report, next-best data indicate a weakening labor market
In normal times, today would have been a jobs day. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been forced to delay the release until December 16 due to the lingering impacts of the Trump administration radically restricting BLS operations during the government shutdown. Further, BLS has announced that we will never have data from the monthly survey of households for October. This means that valuable information for that month—like the overall unemployment rate or the unemployment rate for various demographic groups—will never be known. During the last federal shutdown in 2018–2019, BLS did not suspend its activities and released its employment situation report as normal. In fact, this is the first time in 12 years that a jobs report was delayed and the first time a month of household data will be missed completely.
Federal statistical agencies (FSAs) like BLS and the Census Bureau provide the gold standard data that are crucial for understanding the labor market. The monthly jobs report provides policymakers, businesses, and the public with the most rigorous and timely labor market data they need to make high-stakes decisions. Unfortunately, without a timely release, the Federal Reserve will meet next week without the best data on the state of the labor market. This will materially harm their ability to make a data-informed decision on interest rate policy.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has sought to weaken FSAs. In August, Trump fired the BLS commissioner for accurately reporting data that the administration found politically inconvenient. Amid these historically unprecedented threats, we assembled a new Data Accountability Dashboard that tracks next-best data from other (non-federal) data sources—including ADP employment data, job cut announcements from the Challenger report, and consumer sentiment reports.
These are clearly inferior to the datasets that have historically been collected and analyzed by the nonpartisan, expert professionals who work at FSAs, but they still provide some insights into the direction the economy is moving. This data would also—over time—provide some potential signal if official FSA data were being manipulated or suppressed to hide an economic downturn. Updates to those next-best data this week suggest some weakening in the labor market. Whether this is supported by the FSA data coming back online in coming weeks is a key question people should be watching.
The missing piece in the affordability debate: Higher paychecks
This op-ed was originally published on MS NOW. Read the full piece here.
Affordability—or the lack of it—is dominating the public discourse. “Affordability, affordability, affordability: Democrats’ new winning formula,” proclaims Politico. “Trump tries to seize ‘affordability’ message,” reports The New York Times. Election results in New Jersey, Virginia, New York and elsewhere showed that voters are responding to candidates who speak directly to the cost of living.
Today’s affordability debate, however, focuses almost entirely on prices, as if the only way to make life affordable is to make things cheaper. But that approach misses the bigger picture. Affordability depends on both prices and wages. The roots of today’s affordability crisis actually lie not in recent price spikes, but in the long-term suppression of workers’ pay.
For more than four decades, employers have been actively suppressing the wages of working people, so that corporate managers and owners can claim an ever-larger share of the income generated by what workers produce. Government policies facilitated these efforts.
Trump’s new H-2A wage rule will radically cut the wages of all farmworkers: New estimates show farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually under DOL’s updated Adverse Effect Wage Rate
The Trump administration will cut the pay of all farmworkers by reducing the minimum wages paid to workers filling seasonal agricultural jobs in the H-2A visa program. By lowering wage rates implemented by the Department of Labor (DOL), we estimate that over 350,000 H-2A farmworkers could see their annual wages cut by a total of $2 billion or more—between 26% to 32% of their wages. These significant wage cuts for H-2A workers will put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. farmworkers, reducing their total annual wages by about $3 billion—up to 9% of their total wages. Total losses in pay for all farmworkers will range from $4.4 to $5.4 billion—roughly 10% to 12% of their total wages—according to our estimates.
The farmworkers who toil in the fields do not deserve a pay cut—they deserve a raise. Instead of cutting wages, the Trump administration should restore the previous standards that required employers to pay H-2A workers no less than the average wage for field and livestock workers according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Delayed jobs report shows job losses in August followed by small September bounceback
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning.
Trump is slashing safety nets for Native communities: This will widen disparities in poverty, food insecurity, and health care access
Trump is straining the capacity of the federal government to meet its obligations to Tribal Nations and communities. This began even before the ongoing shutdown, with the administration’s persistent attacks on funding and eligibility requirements for basic needs programs. Two years ago, we wrote about how the enduring effects of colonialism and state-sanctioned violence produce disproportionate burdens of poverty for American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) families and children. Recent poverty statistics released by the Census Bureau for 2024 show that these families and children continue to remain disproportionately vulnerable to material shortcomings. This persistent experience with economic insecurity has also left AIAN families and children exposed to hunger and with limited access to health insurance and care.
The relentless attack of the Trump-Vance administration on basic needs programs, access to data, and economic equity will harm the well-being of Native families and children even more. This is evident when we examine the impact of the administration’s cuts to vital programs like Medicaid and SNAP. The ongoing government shutdown threatens to further exacerbate the gaps in the provision of quality services that Native communities rely on for their health and nutritional needs.
The school bus driver shortage has improved slightly but continues to stress K–12 public education
Key findings:
- School bus driver employment has increased modestly in the last year but is still 9.5% lower than in 2019.
- The recent increase appears to be driven by rising wages—school bus drivers have seen 4.2% real hourly wage growth in the past year, the quickest rate since the pandemic.
- However, the end of pandemic relief funds—in conjunction with the instability and attacks on public education by the Trump administration—threaten to reverse this recent progress.
The school bus driver shortage continues to play out across the country, making it more challenging for students to get to school and placing additional burdens on the K–12 public education system. As has been typical in recent years, the beginning of the school year brought forward a steady stream of reports documenting challenges schools are experiencing hiring bus drivers. Our latest analysis finds that school bus driver employment remains 9.5% below 2019 staffing levels.
But there are positive signs that school districts are taking steps to address the shortage. School bus driver employment overall has increased modestly in the last year, with growth in public K–12 schools likely being driven by increasing hourly wages for bus drivers.
It is important to note the available data likely do not fully capture the impact of the ending of pandemic relief funds or the instability for school districts created by the Trump administration. During the summer—a vital time for school district planning and hiring decisions—the Trump administration temporarily withheld $6.2 billion in funds from before- and after-school programs and teacher development. The Trump administration is also seeking to fully dismantle the Department of Education. Harsh anti-immigrant policies are also having harmful impacts on students and education staff. Under these circumstances, more time is needed to get a better sense of how policy changes during 2025 have impacted the K–12 education workforce.
Under the government shutdown, NLRB cases are on hold and the future of the agency remains uncertain
As the government shutdown nears the end of its third full week, nearly a quarter of the federal workforce is furloughed. That means that more than 600,000 workers are not performing important federal service jobs—and are not receiving a paycheck. Still, while some federal agencies are working in limited capacity, many worker protection agencies have ceased the enforcement of our nation’s labor laws. For example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ceased almost all case handling, including conducting routine union elections and investigating unfair labor practice charges. This means workers’ ability to exercise their right to form unions or hold their employers accountable for violating the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) are on hold indefinitely until the government reopens. However, even after the government reopens, workers’ rights will still be under attack due to pre-shutdown actions of the Trump administration.Read more
The missing piece in the Senate committee hearing on the challenges facing newly unionized workers
Earlier this month, the Republican-led U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) notably held a hearing on labor law reform that sought to both identify problems workers face when they seek to unionize and explore possible solutions.
A major focus of the hearing was Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) Faster Labor Contracts Act—bipartisan legislation to improve the process for reaching initial collective bargaining agreements when workers first organize a union. Currently, it is a common tactic for employers to slow-walk the bargaining process because there are no penalties for doing so, and delay frustrates workers and undermines their union. Research shows that only 36% of newly organized bargaining units achieve an initial collective bargaining agreement within a year, and a third of newly organized bargaining units still do not have a first contract after three years.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act would require parties to begin bargaining promptly after a union is certified, and if bargaining fails to produce an agreement within 90 days (or longer if the parties agree), the parties would be required to engage in mediation. If mediation was not successful, an arbitration panel would be convened to hear from both parties and render a final and binding decision on the terms of an initial collective bargaining agreement. Through this process, workers would be assured of reaching an initial collective bargaining agreement—the reason they sought to organize a union—within a reasonable period of time.
Amid the shutdown data blackout, state unemployment insurance claims continue to shed light on the labor market
On Friday, October 3, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) did not publish the September Employment Situation Summary report. The monthly “jobs report” provides policymakers, businesses, and the public with the most rigorous and timely employment data on the labor market. The absence of official data comes at a crucial time, as several Trump administration policies—including immigration enforcement, chaotic tariffs, and federal workforce cuts—have heightened uncertainty about the current labor market. The suspension of all BLS activities related to labor market data is unnecessary and harms the economy as it delays vital information about the labor market. These data delays can lead economic actors (e.g., the Federal Reserve, Congress, investors, and employers) to fall behind the curve of economic events and hence make suboptimal decisions.Read more