Progress on paid leave in the South: New state parental leave policies are a small but welcome step toward comprehensive paid leave for all Southern workers
While still lagging the rest of the country regarding workers’ access to paid leave, several states in the South—including Alabama and Mississippi this year—have begun to take the small but welcome step of ensuring paid parental leave to some public employees. While these laws cover only certain groups of workers and solely provide the paid parental portion of Paid Family and Medical Leave, they nevertheless represent an important step toward achieving more comprehensive paid leave access across the South. Read more
By repealing paid sick leave, Missouri legislators will hurt working families
Late last Wednesday night, the Missouri Republican-controlled legislature overrode the will of the state’s voters by repealing the paid sick leave portion of Proposition A, a ballot measure passed with 58% support in the 2024 election. This short-sighted decision is a step backward for Missouri’s working families and a violation of the democratic process.Read more
Coordinated attacks on state labor standards are laying the groundwork for dangerous Project 2025 proposals to undermine all workers’ rights
Key takeaways:
- Some state lawmakers are abetting Trump’s far-right, anti-worker agenda laid out in Project 2025 by proposing legislation that intentionally conflicts with federal worker protection laws.
- State-by-state efforts to erode workers’ rights—including protections against hazardous or exploitative child labor, the right to a minimum wage, and a safe workplace—build pressure for eventual relaxation or elimination of standards for the whole country.
- These attacks are not new, but they are an increasing threat under an administration that has launched an all-out war on workers and the federal agencies that safeguard their rights.
- State lawmakers have a responsibility and opportunity to resist such attacks and strengthen state worker protections.
Following a growing trend, Republican lawmakers this year proposed legislation in Florida, Kentucky, and Ohio that would undermine federal laws on child labor, minimum wage, and worker health and safety protections. These proliferating state challenges to federal law are laying the groundwork for more extreme and dangerous Project 2025 proposals to allow employers across the country to hire children for hazardous jobs or to allow states to “opt out” of various federal labor standards like the minimum wage.
Southern and Midwestern districts are the most vulnerable to Social Security cuts and disruptions
Recent attacks on the Social Security Administration (SSA) by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and others in the Trump administration threaten the stability of this critical agency. In addition to endangering the financial well-being of millions of retired, disabled, and low-income people in the U.S., delays and disruptions also harm state and local economies dependent on this income. While Social Security’s “Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance” (OASDI) benefits amount to roughly 5% of national income as measured by GDP, they account for nearly 10% of the income that U.S. consumers can actually spend (as opposed to noncash benefits received by individuals and income flowing to businesses, governments, and nonprofits—all of which are included in GDP).
Since President Trump took office, SSA has announced plans to terminate 7,000 staff positions and close field and regional offices, which has led to long wait times, website crashes, and other disruptions. Trump, Musk, and other senior officials have repeatedly disparaged the agency, calling it a “Ponzi scheme” and alleging, without evidence, that millions of deceased people are receiving improper payments. Rapid policy shifts and reversals, including changes to the types of transactions that can be processed over the phone, have caused confusion among staff and beneficiaries alike, exacerbating the staffing shortage as panicked beneficiaries and would-be claimants flood the agency’s 800 number and field offices.Read more
Trump attacks on temporary immigration protections like TPS hurt the economy and strip millions of their workplace rights
The Trump administration has waged numerous attacks on workers’ rights during its first 100 days, as outlined in EPI’s recent report. Some of the most damaging actions include targeting millions of migrant workers who have been granted the ability to reside and work in the United States lawfully, and who are currently employed in key industries like construction, hospitality, and food processing. The administration has been ending, canceling, pausing, and declining to renew protections and work permits through programs like Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan Parole Program (CHNV), the Uniting for Ukraine Program, and others. And if leaving millions of workers without workplace rights wasn’t enough, they’re also targeting them for deportation—in part because workers with these protections are easier to find given that the government already possesses much of their personal information. Aside from being cruel and irrational, these actions will have negative economic impacts, hurting growth and causing employers to lose valuable employees.
Trump has already announced the cancelation of status for roughly 2 million people with TPS and parole, and more are on the horizon. Some of these efforts are paused because of litigation, but there’s little hope that the programs and precarious statuses will survive Trump’s attacks in the long term. Trump is also now instructing immigration judges to deny asylum to applicants before they’ve had an opportunity to have their cases fully heard in court—which would leave asylum-seekers without work authorization and make them targets for deportation, too.
Altogether, nearly 5.6 million people in the U.S. held a temporary but precarious immigration status in 2024, accounting for roughly 40% of the total unauthorized immigrant population of 13.7 million (see Table 1). This includes over 2 million people who are asylum-seekers. (The migrants who qualified for protections like TPS and parole, as well as asylum-seekers, are formally considered and counted as part of the unauthorized immigrant population; see explanations from Pew and the Migration Policy Institute, for example.)
Trump-led attacks on equity are setting the stage for our next public health crisis
What is happening?
The Trump administration is advancing an anti-equity agenda that will make people in the U.S. sicker and less economically secure. In his first 100 days, Trump rescinded dozens of Biden-era executive orders designed to advance racial equity and directed federal agencies to end all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility offices and programs. His “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” EO takes direct aim at the pursuit of racial equity as a policy goal by attacking Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (and religion and sex as well in the case of title VII) in programs that receive federal funding and employment, respectively.
Trump’s order for government agencies to remove all content and materials related to equity from government websites—leading to the disappearance of words like “diversity,” “historically,” and “female” from government documents—clearly shows that his administration does not value the perspectives, lived experiences, and struggles of those who are not white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender. Trump’s anti-equity actions will stunt efforts to understand, measure, document, and address health and economic disparities. For all the attempts made by the Biden administration to treat equity as a federal policy goal, Trump’s objective is to reverse that progress.Read more
Corruption in plain sight: How Elon Musk has benefited from the first 100 days of the Trump administration
During the first 100 days of his administration, President Trump has consistently put the interests of billionaires and corporations over working people. This is most evident by the Trump administration already halting or dismissing nearly 90 investigations against lawbreaking corporations, according to a recent report by Public Citizen. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this is tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Before Inauguration Day, federal agencies had at least 32 open investigations into Musk’s companies. Since then, Trump has appointed Musk as a special government employee to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is slashing government programs and jobs and targeting many agencies that are investigating his companies. His actions in this role have led to the end of many, if not all, of these investigations. The end of these investigations will not only boost Musk’s bottom line, but they will also make U.S. workers less safe. The following are examples of how Musk has benefited from the Trump administration halting investigations into Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX.
Class of 2025: Young workers were poised to graduate into a promising labor market, but Trump policy actions could unravel progress
Key findings:
- Young workers—those 16–24 years old—have experienced historically strong real wage growth (9.1%) since February 2020, exceeding the wage growth for workers ages 25 and older (5.4%).
- Wages for young workers have also grown faster than the prices of rent and college tuition since February 2020.
- A smaller share of young adults is unemployed, underemployed, or “idled”—neither employed nor enrolled in further education—than their averages over the prior three decades.
- However, recent Trump administration policy actions could be devastating for young adults trying to get a foothold in the labor market as they enter the workforce following graduation.
Young workers have experienced a strong labor market coming out of the pandemic recession, with better job opportunities and faster wage growth than they experienced in much of the prior four decades. However, the Trump administration’s recent attacks on the federal workforce, higher education, and registered apprenticeships—as well as imposing extreme tariffs—threaten to reverse these gains. In this first post in a series on young adults, we examine their labor market prospects as they graduate from high school and college this spring and discuss how policy changes might impact their prospects.1
The five-alarm fire that public education is facing
Acknowledgments: This blog post would not have been possible without the intellectual contribution and data analysis conducted by Joanna LeFebvre and Katja Krieger.
All children deserve to attend welcoming and well-funded schools where they can learn and grow, regardless of race, disability, or income. But funding for public schools, where nearly 90% of all U.S. students learn, is at a near crisis point. The Trump administration’s goals, which are taken right out of Project 2025, seem to be to defund public education to the point that it doesn’t work, then offer private school vouchers as a solution to a manufactured problem. In this post, we highlight five ways public education is on fire in the United States and the damage this will do to students’ abilities to learn and thrive. Instead of cutting funds, lawmakers should invest in public schools, one of the best tools we still have to build a prosperous, equitable country.
Alarm level 1: COVID-19 relief funding for public schools is winding down. In some cases, the administration is ending it prematurely
This academic year (2024–2025) marks the end of the financial support schools were receiving to address the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief III funds (ESSER III). The COVID-19 pandemic, and the changing learning environments that ensued, meant that schools needed funds to address the significant academic, social, emotional, physical, and mental health needs of their students. This funding was distributed in recent years with the last distribution, ESSER III, worth a total of $122 billion allocated to districts around the country. Many students, especially those living in poverty, have not recovered from pandemic-related learning loss. The end of this funding means that districts will now have fewer resources to help students get back on track. Rigorous research has demonstrated that this federal aid to public schools was highly successful, with measurable improvements to student outcomes in states and districts where more aid was spent. Taking the educational challenges imposed by the pandemic seriously would mean recognizing the high value this aid has provided.
However, in late March, the Trump administration canceled extensions that had been granted to states to spend remaining ESSER funds. Effectively, districts are losing out on the funding allocated to them in the form of COVID-19 relief funds. Canceled extensions represent almost $3 billion in lost funding that had already been committed to tutoring services, reading interventions, building improvements, and more. Clawing back these funds jeopardizes improved academic outcomes for many students and their ability to learn in healthy and safe environments. The administration’s refusal to reimburse school districts for funding that has already been spent could force them to cut teaching and other staff positions to make up the cost, ultimately harming students.
Jobs report doesn’t reveal clear signs of broad economic weakness—yet
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 177,000 jobs added in April. Read the full thread here.