Punching In: What Julie Su Learned Leading the Labor Department

Monday morning musings for workplace watchers

Su’s Vision for NYC | NIH Scientists Try Again

Parker Purifoy: Former acting Labor Secretary Julie Su has a vision for economic justice in New York City, saying she has taken lessons from her time leading the US Department of Labor.

For the first-ever Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice, serving under Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), the city needs to be affordable for working-class and marginalized communities, Su said at an event held June 11 by The Association for a Better New York.

While growth on Wall Street may be booming, an ABNY study, published last week in partnership with the New York City Employment and Training Coalition, shows that a majority of New Yorkers can’t afford the city’s cost of living. Economic justice means working to reverse that, Su said.

“A city that prices out its own workforce is like a business that stops investing in itself and then wonders why output is falling, so economic justice isn’t the consolation prize that you hand out after growth happens, it’s the precondition for even greater growth and growth that lasts,” she said.

Su served as deputy labor secretary during the Biden administration and was made acting labor secretary when Marty Walsh departed. She served in that position for nearly two years after Senate Republicans refused to confirm her to the post permanently.

At the DOL, Su focused on upping enforcement of child labor and wage and hour laws, along with helping to smooth labor conflicts in the private sector.

During her speech, she also hinted that the Trump administration is hindering efforts to bolster workforce development initiatives and infrastructure programs.

“I saw firsthand what significant federal action could do: clean energy tax credits, investments in domestic manufacturing, more apprenticeship and training dollars,” she said. “Those investments have been dramatically cut, and many of the programs dismantled, and I’m not saying that we can make up for federal investments. We cannot and the federal headwinds on our economy are extremely strong.”

Her comments come shortly after a House of Representatives committee advanced an appropriations bill for the DOL that would cut the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and the Women’s Bureau. That bill also largely rejected the Trump administration’s request to shutter Job Corps and refocus funds towards state grant and registered apprenticeship programs.

Julie Su speaking to Congress in 2023.

Photographer Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Ian Kullgren: Scientists at the National Institutes of Health are once again sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s control of the agency, saying that research funding and protocols have increasingly been politicized.

Their grievances came in a follow-up letter to the Bethesda Declaration, a June 2025 letter signed by 71 current and former employees warning NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya that the agency’s credibility has been threatened.

The second letter essentially says no one listened, and that everything they predicted came true.

“The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026,” the new letter says.

The letter highlights the Trump administration’s cuts to staff. As of April, the NIH lost more than 4,400 employees, at least 20% of its staff. More than a third of contracts have been cut, posing a “critical threat” to the hospital’s ability to function, it says.

The departures extend all the way to leadership, the letter says. The NIH lost 17 of 27 institute director positions, 14 of which still remain vacant. And then there’s research: the letter says the NIH issued 24% fewer grants, sharply limiting agency funding.

The group claims that the agency under Bhattacharya has weakened the peer-review process—a crucial practice in which scientists review colleagues’ work for flaws before publication—and has terminated grants that clashed with the administration’s views. For example, the letter says the agency has used text analysis tools to review grants for terms that don’t align with the administration’s priorities, including mentions of specific races, and has canceled more than 2,700 grants related to health disparities.

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