The department's inspector general probed into allegations that she abused her position as a top Trump administration official.
Page A3From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 4 September 2026
Labor Department, watchdog for workplace harassment, billed a strip club visit and tolerated harassment, IG finds.
As it ran on the front
The Inspector General's report on the Labor Department runs to the kind of length that makes you want a highlighter, so let's use one. All together now — the cover page. The agency in question is the one whose entire federal mandate is to investigate whether your workplace treats you decently: wage theft, safety violations, hostile conduct on the clock. Turn the page.
Finding one: the former secretary billed personal travel to that agency. Not travel adjacent to the agency's mission — travel for herself, charged to the department built to ask other employers exactly this question. The report does not editorialize. It itemizes. That is what an Inspector General does; it is, structurally, the most boring possible document, which is what makes this one worth reading twice.…
…(cont) Finding two, and here the report stops being boring: a strip club visit, on the record, tied to her time in office, alongside a relationship with an assigned bodyguard. We are told this by the New York Post, which found it "salacious." We would call it "line 12," but the drawer is the drawer.
Finding three is the one that should outlast the tabloid write-up, and the bouncing ball goes here twice because it deserves it — all together now: the IG also found the department tolerated harassment inside itself. Read that clause next to the department's actual job description. The agency does not investigate harassment as a hobby. It is the harassment cop. The report is, in effect, the cop's own precinct getting cited by internal affairs for the exact conduct it is paid to write up when it happens to a warehouse worker in Ohio.
None of this required a leak, a subpoena, or a whistleblower smuggling documents out in a lunch bag. It required an Inspector General doing the job an Inspector General is funded to do, and then publishing the results in a government report that anyone can request. That is the whole caper. There is no safe, no janitor with a master key, no dead drop. There is a PDF.
The taxpayers who funded the personal travel are, by definition, the same workers the department exists to protect when their own bosses do something similar. They do not get an Inspector General. They get a complaint line, if the complaint line is staffed, in an agency the report says was busy being exactly the kind of workplace it was built to police.
“This is the whole racket in one document: the agency you'd call if your boss harassed you was, at the top, running a workplace where the boss harassed people and charged the strip club trip to your tax dollars. They'll tell you there's no money for enforcement, no money for inspectors — there was money, it just went to a bodyguard's travel bill instead of your case file. The IG only catches it because the IG isn't for sale yet; that's not a comfort, that's a countdown.”
“Look, "personal travel" is a documentation issue, an accounting matter, we've all misfiled an expense report — did I just compare this to your Uber receipt, that's not landing. And the "tolerated harassment" finding is about culture broadly, it's not like she personally — okay, the report is pretty specific about that. It's a legacy HR staffing problem she inherited, mostly, going forward, is the point I'd make if I still worked there.”
The receipts
Lori Chavez-DeRemer spent Labor Department funds on personal travel and tolerated harassment in the agency, its inspector general found.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.