The Honorable Bill Cassidy, Chair

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee 

United States Senate 

Washington, D.C. 20510 

The Honorable Bernie Sanders, Ranking Member 

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee 

United States Senate 

Washington, D.C. 20510 

Dear Chair Cassidy and Ranking Member Sanders: 

We, the undersigned organizations, write this letter to state our opposition to the nomination of Jonathan Berry to serve as the Solicitor of Labor at the United States Department of Labor. 

One of the architects of Project 2025, and the lead writer of the labor and employment chapter, his policy proposals are dangerous, anti-worker, and out of step with what working people in this country want and need. The Senate should decline to confirm him. 

Our disagreements with Mr. Berry’s substantive positions are many and varied. Rather than listing all of them, we draw your attention to policies that should engender bi-partisan concern from anyone who claims to care about workers.  Mr. Berry has proposed the following:

• Weaken wage standards – he believes that states should be able to waivers from the Fair Labor Standards Acts guarantee of the paltry minimum wage of $7.25, the guarantee of overtime for hours worked over 40 per week, and basic protections against child labor, and wants to allow employers in federally funded projects to pay less than prevailing wages in the region, undermining the rights in the Service Contract Act and Davis-Bacon Act. 
• Encourage an increase in child labor – he proposes that the current hazardous work regulations, which are based on empirical scientific studies about the danger of particular jobs for young workers, be amended to allow children to work in jobs that are considered inherently dangerous for them regardless of training.  He would instead replace scientific study with “parental consent.” 
• Continue the war on our civil rights – ban all public and private sector initiatives designed to make sure that women, people of color, and other marginalized groups have the opportunity to fully and fairly compete for jobs for which they are qualified, ban the use of the Congressionally authorized disparate impact theory of liability for employment discrimination, and amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban the EEOC from collecting the basic data it has long collected to determine if employers are engaging in discriminatory employment practices. 
• Eliminate OFCCP – even after Trump’s executive order stripping much of this agency’s authority, it still has the legal responsibility to protect the rights Veterans and workers with disabilities in federal contract employment.   
• Eviscerate protections for LGBTQ+ members of the workforce – rescind the EEOC’s guidance on the rights of LGBTQ+ people in the workforce and declare that it is legal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics, contrary to the clear ruling of the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County. 
• Mandate that the EEOC’s priorities should be failure to accommodate disabilities, religion, and pregnancy. Protecting against racial discrimination, sex discrimination, sexual harassment, national origin discrimination, and discrimination against other legally protected classes would fall by the wayside.

As the National Partnership for Women and Families has documented,[1] Mr. Berry’s nomination is a direct threat to women workers everywhere, but as explained in the document and above, the threats spread to vulnerable workers throughout the workforce.

Mr. Berry is not fit to serve as the Solicitor of Labor, and we urge you to carefully consider his nomination, his ample public writings including Project 2025, and his answers to questions as his hearing. We are confident that such careful consideration will make it abundantly clear that he should not be confirmed. 

Sincerely,