President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to support women, grow jobs, and revive American manufacturing in his second term. But a recent round of cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to undermine all three of those supposed priorities.
On Tuesday, the Department of Labor (DOL) terminated more than two dozen grants to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology, and to fund programs to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and workplace harassment. The grants were administered by the Women’s Bureau, an office created by congressional mandate in 1920 to support women’s employment.
This article, the first to report on the grant cancellations, is based on communications with four current and former Labor Department employees familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau, and five of the affected grantees, some of whom also provided copies of termination notices. Experts and advocates say the cancellations will undermine women’s safe participation in the workforce at a time when Trump has promised “a boom like no other” and “millions and millions of new jobs.” They also threaten to reverse the progress women have made in the trades: Research conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR)—a Washington, DC, think tank that researches women’s employment—has found, for example, that the number of women working in construction grew by nearly 30 percent from 2018 to 2023. (Spokespeople for DOL, the Women’s Bureau, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
“A lot of these programs have been designed to help women get into the pipeline of some of these male-dominated jobs, and make those jobs safer places for women to be,” said Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at IWPR. “Any administration [would] value programs that help overcome these barriers…This is clearly not doing that.”
DOGE sees it differently. In a Tuesday night post on X, the office bragged about cutting millions “in wasteful DEI grants” at DOL, including cuts to “gender equity awareness training.”
But DOGE’s cuts may not be legal: The two-year grants are mandated by a bipartisan act of Congress passed in 1991 that aimed to get more women into apprenticeships and nontraditional careers, and required the Labor Department to make support and training grants to that end.
The most significant Women’s Bureau cancellations affected the congressionally mandated, two-year Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries where they constitute less than 25 percent of workers, including construction, manufacturing, and information technology. Grantees from the past two years received notices on Tuesday that their funding was immediately being terminated. Four of the termination notices reviewed by Mother Jones state that the programs do not support the department’s “priorities for its grant funding, including with regard to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” (Trump, of course, signed an executive order on his first day in office seeking to purge DEI programs across the federal government.)
Last year, the Women’s Bureau awarded $6 million in WANTO funding to nine organizations, the department’s largest-ever award; the year before that, it awarded $5 million to seven groups. The only grant not canceled on Tuesday, according to DOL sources, was one given to Chicago Women in Trades, which is suing the administration for its anti-DEI executive orders.
Nora Spencer, founder and CEO of Hope Renovations, a North Carolina nonprofit that supports and trains women to work in construction, was in a workforce development meeting on Tuesday when the Labor Department notified her that her organization was losing more than $700,000 in 2023 grant funding, which it used to support job training for 76 participants, including recent high school graduates and people in their 50s and 60s, with tools and materials, instructors’ salaries, and internship stipends—and about half of which it was still counting on reimbursement for. The internship program will now have to be shuttered, Spencer said, and she is bracing to potentially cut staff.
The termination notice justified the cancellation by quoting Spencer’s grant application, in which she wrote that Hope Renovations sought “to increase the number of women…in construction.”
“It was so blatantly sexist,” Spencer told me. “It stung to see that from my own government.”
The cancellation did not make economic sense to Spencer, either: The construction industry, she pointed out, is already expected to take a hit from Trump’s tariffs and mass deportations, given the role that immigrants play in the field, as my colleague Isabela Dias has written. Plus, research has shown that the industry will need to hire more than half a million new skilled workers per year to keep up with demand, especially in light of its aging workforce: More than 40 percent of the current construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031, according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research.
“To be losing a development program at a time that’s really critical to bringing on workers, it’s insulting to the industry,” Spencer said. “I’ve worked with builders who are like, ‘I don’t care what gender you are, I need to know if you can swing a hammer or if you can pull wire.’”
Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, is also losing the nearly $400,000 WANTO grant it received last year. That grant helped fund training for about 55 women and nonbinary people per year for careers in construction and renewable energy, and to launch a new pre-apprenticeship program in the semiconductor and advanced manufacturing industries, according to its executive director Rhoni Basden. That program, which was going to kick off this fall, is now on indefinite pause. The news, she said, came as “an absolute shock.”
“It completely dismantles [the] only progress that has been made within these industries,” Basden said, adding that half of Vermont’s population consists of working-age women. “This is a prime program to help fill multiple gaps that our state is experiencing.”
Moore Community House, a nonprofit in Mississippi, lost more than $700,000 in funding for its Women in Construction program, which has already trained nearly 200 people and was counting on $250,000 in further reimbursement. Branden Forshee, the organization’s CEO, pointed out that Mississippi has some of the country’s highest poverty rates for women and children. “Workforce training programs like this one are so important in this area,” Forshee said, “and taking funding from that, again, it directly contradicts [Trump’s] goal” of creating jobs.
A Labor Department employee described the WANTO program as “definitely life-changing for a lot of women,” saying the funding “gives [women] a career path they might not have had before.” Another DOL employee said the DOGE cuts would mean that fewer women “are going to be exposed to these different career paths” or “have the opportunity to get careers in these industries that have family-sustaining wages.”
A separate set of Biden-era Women’s Bureau grants known as FARE—Fostering Access, Rights, and Equity—that focused on preventing and addressing gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace were simultaneously canceled, DOL sources said. Last year, that program awarded $1.4 million in grants to four community organizations, according to an archived version of its webpage.
The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence used a FARE grant to create a toolkit to help employers identify signs of domestic violence, said the coalition’s CEO, Meghan Scanlon. The organization was also about to begin creating a more in-depth training program on the topic for employers, staff, and supervisors, which will no longer proceed, she said.
While it’s not unusual for new administrations to create new programs, it is unusual for officials to claw back funding that a previous administration already promised to pay out, Labor Department sources said. And the cancellations are especially ironic in light of Trump’s campaign-trail promise to “PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”
“He’s literally taking away the enforcement mechanisms for protections,” Bahn, of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said, calling the move “absurd.” (As I have reported, the Trump administration also reneged on that promise by gutting the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health and cancelling grants for programs supporting crime victims.)
A pair of smaller DOL grants—one focused on projects to get women and people of color into infrastructure jobs, and another to reduce gender and racial disparities in state paid leave programs—were also canceled, according to the same departmental sources.
Spencer, who runs the formerly Women’s Bureau–funded construction program in North Carolina, expects DOGE’s latest cuts to come back to haunt the Trump administration.
“We live in an industry that is very much filled with people who voted for Trump, and I think there’s a lot of feeling right now in [the] industry that they’re just overlooking people who voted them in,” Spencer said. “I think things like this are just going to exacerbate that.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.