Former Trump Labor Secretary’s Staff Antics Come To Light

An inspector general report on a Labor Secretary finding a "toxic, intimidating, and humiliating" workplace is not a small thing. This is the department that exists to enforce workplace standards on everyone else in the country. If the findings hold up, the irony is almost too on the nose: the person running the agency that polices bad bosses was, by her own staff's account, kind of a bad boss herself.

That said, we'd like to see the full report before anyone starts drafting the resignation letter. "Ordered to perform personal errands" covers a lot of ground, from genuinely demeaning to the kind of thing that happens in half the offices in Washington when a chief of staff is overwhelmed. Pressuring employees to drink on the job is a more serious allegation and deserves scrutiny on its own terms, not lumped in as color commentary. Inspector general reports are supposed to be sober fact-finding, and we should treat this one that way rather than turning it into a cable news pile-on before the details are fully aired.

Where we do have a real problem is with double standards. If this were a Biden appointee, plenty of people who are currently quiet would be very loud right now, and vice versa. The test of whether anyone actually cares about how federal employees get treated is whether the outrage is consistent no matter whose name is on the door. Chavez-DeRemer should answer for what her staff experienced, in detail, in public. Nobody gets a pass because of the letter next to their name, and nobody should pretend otherwise.