Last week in a confirmation hearing, Russell Vought, President Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, said he would support work requirements for Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income people. His position—which has also shown up in Republican proposals for the House reconciliation package—was couched in language to “encourage people to get back into the work force, increase labor force participation and give people again the dignity of work.”

In reality, work requirements have nothing to do with getting people into the workforce. While increasing labor force participation and helping people obtain the dignity of work are important goals, people don’t actually need encouragement to do this. The incentive to work is already there: It gives people sufficient income to not live in grinding poverty. People with income low enough to qualify for social safety net benefits need support from policymakers to access programs like Medicaid and SNAP, not new rounds of bureaucratic paper pushing, which is what work requirements mainly achieve.

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The Trump-Vance administration continued to focus its policy initiatives on attacking the federal workforce and government services, beginning the week with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issuing a memo ending all federal grants and loans. That action—which would have ended funding for things like Head Start programs’ early childhood education services and cancer research—was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, leading the administration to rescind the memo. But the memo made clear the administration’s desire to halt funding for programs it deems to be out of line with its political ideology.

Similar political purges occurred at two key independent worker protection agencies: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). While some agency positions are susceptible to political churn, President Trump fired EEOC commissioners and NLRB officials confirmed by the Senate to serve terms that stretched beyond 2025. The firings set up potential legal challenges. Both agencies now lack the quorum required to engage in certain enforcement actions, leaving workers who depend on the agencies without recourse.Read more

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the effort largely associated with Elon Musk. The stated goals are to reduce wasteful spending and eliminate unnecessary regulations. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are taking it seriously. More worryingly, there are good-faith proponents of improving the federal government’s capacity who seem willing to take it seriously.

This would be a mistake, as it’s clearly a bad-faith effort rooted in ignorance and a knee-jerk desire to shrink the federal government, both for ideological reasons and the creation of space to preserve the tax cuts for the rich and corporations that will be locked in later this year.

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Beginning this year, Americans in three more states—Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska—will have access to paid sick leave, bringing the total number of states that provide paid sick leave up to 18 (plus Washington D.C.). These policies provide workers short-term leave to care for themselves or their family when they become sick.

Paid sick leave laws have passed at state and local levels in record numbers over the last few years. These laws improve public health by reducing the spread of illness, and their costs to businesses are extremely modest—generally requiring no measurable change to business practices. Yet new evidence is building support for a benefit that workers have long known about, and employers are only recently getting hip to: Paid sick leave is a key work support that may increase employment and workforce attachment.

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President Trump’s executive order to revoke federal funding for investments in manufacturing clean vehicle technologies portends a bleak future for the jobs and communities building big trucks and buses in the United States, our new report co-authored with the BlueGreen Alliance details.  

Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are a backbone of U.S. economic life. Transitioning these vehicles from internal combustion engines (ICE) to low- and no-emission technologies is a critical step for eliminating greenhouse gas and other toxic emissions from the transportation economy. At the same time, this transition could have serious implications for the ICE vehicle manufacturing industry and auto workers—as well as the steel and aluminum industries that contribute so much to vehicle manufacturing—that have long been hammered by outsourcing and offshoring, union-busting, and intensifying international competition.

If done right, the transition to manufacturing clean trucks and buses presents a rare opportunity to reverse these trends and revitalize long-beleaguered industries with expanding investment, creation of good jobs, and broadly rising incomes in the United States. If done wrong, the transition risks exacerbating the current trends that see companies moving production offshore or to U.S. states embracing anti-worker policies, threatening the security of the good jobs that remain.

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The Trump administration issued a series of policies in its first week, largely focused on the federal workforce, immigration, and eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and protections.  

A few key policies are highlighted below, but you can find a comprehensive catalogue of all policies relevant to working people and the economy at Federal Policy Watch, an EPI online tool documenting actions by the Trump administration, Congress, federal agencies, and the courts. You can subscribe to daily Federal Policy Watch updates here.

Federal workforce  

President Trump instituted a series of executive orders (EOs) aimed at gutting the federal workforce and politicizing the career civil service.

• Most significantly, he implemented Schedule F, which upends longstanding job protections for federal career employees and makes it easier to fire them for any reason. Moving a sizable chunk of the federal workforce to Schedule F makes it easier for President Trump to shift the work of the government away from the public interest and toward the president’s political goals.
• A new EO overturned a Biden administration executive order that protected the rights of federal workers to collectively bargain and affirmed due process protections.
• In an attempt to quickly shrink the federal workforce, President Trump issued an EO requiring federal workers to report in person to the office five days each week, ending remote work arrangements.
• Another EO freezes the hiring of federal civilian employees and directs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the United States DOGE Service (USDS), to submit a plan to reduce the size of the federal workforce within 90 days.

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Seven years after conservative Michigan lawmakers scrapped a ballot measure that—if passed—would have increased the state’s minimum wage and gradually eliminated the lower tipped minimum wage, a Michigan Supreme Court decision is slated to go into effect next month to reinstate the ballot measure’s benefits for low-wage workers. However, conservative state lawmakers are considering new legislation to preserve the subminimum tipped wage, which would weaken pay increases for Michigan’s nearly 100,000 tipped workers.

Michigan lawmakers could once again interfere with voters’ desire to strengthen economic security for low-wage workers

Michigan’s minimum wage is scheduled to increase to $12.48 on February 21, 2025, before growing each year to $14.97 in 2028.1 The tipped minimum wage, which is currently set to 38% of the regular minimum wage, will also increase annually from $5.99 in February 2025 until eventually matching the regular minimum wage in 2030.

This series of increases is the latest legacy of a 2018 state ballot initiative that would have raised the state minimum wage to $12.00 an hour by 2022 and gradually eliminated the subminimum tipped wage. The measure was highly popular with voters, securing more than 280,000 signatures to be placed on the ballot. Before the full electorate could weigh in on the ballot measure, however, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature chose to “adopt and amend” the measure and remove it from the ballot by passing their own weaker minimum wage legislation. The enacted legislation extended the implementation of the increase by eight years to 2030 and preserved the lower tipped minimum wage, dramatically weakening the benefits to workers.

In 2024, the Michigan Supreme Court found the “adopt and amend” tactic used by Republican lawmakers was unconstitutional as it denied Michigan voters’ their right to the ballot initiative process. The court ordered the minimum wage to be increased more rapidly in the spirit of the original measure and that the value of the increases be adjusted to account for inflation since 2018. The court decision also reestablished the phase-out of the tipped minimum wage.

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President-elect Trump will inherit unquestionably the strongest economy for an incoming administration since the George W. Bush administration. That strong economic performance heading up to the 2001 transition, moreover, was largely buoyed by an overvalued stock market that was about to deflate and cause a recession. There are no such obvious macroeconomic imbalances that look set to drag on growth in 2025 or beyond.

While the labor market has slightly softened in recent months, job growth in December was extremely rapid and accompanied by wage growth that remained above inflation yet fully compatible with a return to 2% inflation—the Federal Reserve’s preferred target. In short, the labor market remains extremely strong yet in no need of policy measures to rein it in. All in all, it is hard to imagine an incoming administration wanting a stronger economic situation to inherit.

Table 1 below shows a range of measures indicating the trajectory of the economy for each incoming administration since Bill Clinton.1

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Children, poverty, and economic freedom were at the heart of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 when he spoke before more than 200,000 demonstrators at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In his remarks, Dr. King spoke about the “lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” that curtails the civil and economic rights and agency of Black people in U.S. society. With the Lincoln Memorial as a background, Dr. King dreamed of a day when children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. More than six decades later, child poverty continues to bankrupt the bank of justice that can help make this dream a reality.

Children of color endure a disproportionate share of the burden of poverty in the United States. In 2023, Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) children remained about three times as likely as their non-Hispanic white peers to fall below the poverty line (see Figure A below). Similarly, Asian children were about twice as likely to suffer material shortcomings relative to their white peers.

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