Jonathan Berry, a key architect of the labor chapter of Project 2025, represents a significant threat to gender equity and civil rights in America. His nomination to serve as solicitor of labor – the Department of Labor’s chief legal officer responsible for administering and enforcing over 180 federal labor laws – would give him enormous power to carry out a far-right agenda that undermines protections for women, workers of color, LGBTQI+ individuals, and people with disabilities. The solicitor is the number three official at the department of labor, leading on deciding what cases to bring and what legal interpretations the department will take. These are not idle threats; many of his Project 2025 proposals are already being implemented and affecting workers’ access to their existing labor and employment rights.
Here are 10 reasons why his confirmation would be especially harmful to women:
1. He Authored a Blueprint to Undo Civil Rights Protections
Berry was the lead author of the labor chapter in Project 2025, a plan that proposes dismantling over 50 years of civil rights and gender equity protections. His call to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life” cloaks a broader effort to roll back women’s rights and workplace equality in religious and ideological terms.
2. He Would Be Empowered to Implement Project 2025
As solicitor of labor, Berry would oversee the department’s legal strategies and be central to further advancing Project 2025’s vision. Many of the labor proposals he authored have already begun to take shape in President Trump’s second administration. If confirmed, Berry will have direct authority over legal interpretations, enforcement decisions and will influence policy reversals that could devastate workplace protections for women.
3. He Supported Ending Anti-Discrimination Requirements for Federal Contractors
Project 2025 recommended rescinding Executive Order 11246, a decades-old bipartisan order that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating against employees. Over the years, EO 11246 led to millions in recovered wages for workers and helped ensure equal pay for women working on federal contracts. By ending the requirement on the first day of his Administration, a result of Berry’s proposal, President Trump stripped an important tool for civil rights enforcement from a massive segment of the workforce.
4. He Backs Eliminating the Office Enforcing Those Rights
Berry’s chapter calls for gutting the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the agency that enforces anti-discrimination laws for federal contractors. Following his blueprint, the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has already moved to slash the OFCCP’s staff by 90%, placing most employees on administrative leave and eliminating five of six regional offices. The department recently sent additional layoff notices to most remaining employees. These cuts further jeopardize workers’ access to and enforcement of their civil rights when they work on contracts funded by the federal government.
5. He Will Attack Legal Tools Designed to Address Systemic Discrimination
Berry has laid out a three-part assault on workplace equity:
- He argues that disparate impact liability, which allows workers to challenge neutral policies that disproportionately harm groups of people protected from discrimination, is unconstitutional — contradicting long-standing Supreme Court precedent and Title VII. Disparate impact liability is a critical tool across many areas of law, including employment law, to challenge seemingly neutral policies, such as an algorithmic resume-screening tool that has a selection requirement that filters out female applicants and is not based on business need.
- He opposes diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, labeling them as discriminatory, even though promoting diversity, equity and inclusion is lawful, ensures equal opportunity, and promotes strong workplaces.
- He seeks to stop the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from collecting race and gender data using the EEO-1 form, a vital tool in identifying pay gaps and systemic bias that is used by the EEOC and the Department of Labor. Not collecting data harms efforts to ensure government programs are effective and inclusive and masks structural barriers and inequities. Nevertheless, Berry submitted a comment letter challenging the department’s efforts to collect information on apprenticeship programs and use the information to improve equity in apprenticeship programs.
6. He Wants to Strip Protections From Sex-Based Discrimination
Berry proposes eliminating federal regulations implementing the Supreme Court’s decision that protect workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as eliminating protections based on sex characteristics. Even though nearly 1 in 4 LGBTQI+ people experienced discrimination at work in 2024, this rollback would endanger LGBTQI+ workers’ rights in particular and eliminate rules and enforcement mechanisms that hold employers accountable and protect workers.
7. He Targets Union Protections That Benefit Women
Project 2025 endorsed the unlawful removal of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) members before the end of their term. President Trump fired NLRB Member Gwynne Wilcox, undermining the Board’s ability to protect collective bargaining rights. Member Wilcox’s termination leaves the Board without a quorum and unable to hear cases, giving employers who want to flaunt the law free reign to ignore their workers’ wishes — and refuse to bargain with their workers’ chosen representatives — indefinitely. Research shows union representation significantly benefits all workers, but especially women – particularly Black and Asian women – with higher wages, paid leave, pensions and health coverage. These attacks on worker organizing are antithetical to the labor department’s mission of promoting workers’ welfare, improving working conditions, advancing opportunities and assuring work-related benefits and rights.
8. He Undermines the Women’s Bureau
Berry has disparaged the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, accusing it of having a politicized agenda – a misleading attack on its critical role in identifying and addressing workplace disparities and research on important policies such as child care and paid leave. As indicated in Project 2025, the Women’s Bureau was one of the department’s first three agencies targeted for staff firings.
9. He Undermines Strong Wages and Supports Weakening Worker Protections
Berry opposes stronger overtime protections. Opposing strong overtime protections particularly harms women of color and disabled women, who are disproportionately likely to hold lower paying jobs in critical industries like health care and social services as a result of longstanding, systemic gender, racial and disability injustice. Additionally, instead of supporting overtime policies that would benefit all workers, he has proposed religiously biased policies like overtime pay for the Sabbath, which would default to observance on Sunday and could disadvantage non-Christian workers.
His proposals would also help employers reclassify workers to strip them of benefits like the minimum wage, overtime pay, equal pay and pregnancy accommodations. Misclassification disproportionately affects women and people of color, who are overrepresented in low-wage jobs.
9. He Would Use Federal Law to Restrict Reproductive Rights
The co-founder of a law student anti-abortion group, Berry has long advocated for using federal labor and benefits law to restrict access to abortion, contraception, and fertility care. Project 2025 calls for allowing employers to disincentivize coverage for abortion, surrogacy, and related benefits, which might include the morning-after pill and even IVF – and seeks to empower states to be able to enact these bans without federal intervention.
10. He Supports Firing Career Civil Servants and Weakening Worker Protections
Berry has expressed support for purging nonpartisan civil servants in favor of political loyalists. The National Partnership has documented how cuts to the federal workforce will harm communities and the overall economy, and especially impact Black women, Native women and veteran women workers.
Conclusion
Women’s trust in government leadership has reached record lows under Trump, and Jonathan Berry’s nomination would only deepen this crisis. His policy record is not hypothetical — it is already being implemented. Confirming him would solidify a legal and ideological agenda that prioritizes ideology over equality, and would cause lasting harm to women and underrepresented and historically marginalized workers across the country.
