The Department of Labor’s Faith Leader Is Now Also In Charge of Enforcing Their Rights

A leading man and Department of Labor opposites monthly prayers it has now taken over one of the most important offices of the organization.

Kenneth Wolfe, the DOL’s chief of staff, now also heads the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the office tasked with ensuring that federal contractors comply with anti-discrimination laws. Wolfe’s appointment was quietly announced earlier this month, after the agency released its 2027 budget in April, which would eliminate the office.

Because it oversees government contracts, the OFCCP had control over “about 20 to 25 percent of the American workforce,” said Keir Bickerstaffe, who served as DOL attorney for 16 years before leaving at the end of President Joe Biden’s term in January 2025. lawyers can take companies to court. “The OFCCP can find accommodations on behalf of an entire group of people, it can seek changes in a company’s policies and practices to eliminate discrimination,” says Bickerstaffe.

For many years, it was the agency’s main tool for implementing human rights legislation.

Under President Donald Trump, however, OFCCP has lost many employees resignation and reduce power. In one of his first acts in 2025, Trump signed it Executive Order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-based Opportunity,” which ordered all organizations to end “diversity, equality, and inclusion” in the state and to “combat DEI’s interests, positions, policies, programs, and activities of illegal DEI groups.” This greatly hampered OFCCP’s ability. Someone Executive Order signed in March 2026, titled “Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors,” requires that federal contractors not engage in any DEI.

The new DOL wants 2027 budget cites DEI’s 2025 order as the reason for terminating OFCCP, writing that it “was responsible for enforcing some of these violations, and transferring its remaining jurisdictions to the new Office of Civil Rights.”

“Agency mergers are not a bad thing in theory,” says a DOL official who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “But it is being done for a legitimate purpose that undermines the concept of human rights.”

The DOL did not respond to questions about whether Wolfe will hold a leadership position at the Office of Civil Rights after the merger.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Wolfe’s experience is interactive. She previously worked as a speechwriter for the Republican Congress until 2003, before working in the communications office at the Department of Health and Human Services. He did not mention any legal experience, which was a red flag for Bickerstaffe: “I believe that every director of the OFCCP, that I worked with, had a background in law enforcement and especially some type of human rights law,” said the former DOL attorney.

The DOL did not respond to questions about Wolfe’s qualifications to lead the office, or his potential role by the end of next year.

Before taking on his new role, Wolfe was one of them several religious leaders across the state that has monthly prayers. In another prayer, pastor Leon Benjamin, a former Republican congressman, told the workers that their work “makes America realize that (work) is something God wants us to do.”

DOL employees themselves he spoke to WIRED at that time he said that the prayers, which were held on the day of work, they did not feel comfortable.

There is, apparently, one type of discrimination, however, that the DOL is paying close attention to: In April, the agency. he announced will work with the Department of Justice to “end anti-Christian discrimination.” Earlier this year, the organization he took out a weapon which summarizes each state’s laws regarding religious discrimination in the workplace.