Participants in Hope Renovations' training program are among those who will be affected by DOGE's cancellations of Labor Department grants.Mother Jones illustration; Nora Spencer

President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to support women, grow jobs, and revive American manufacturing in his second term. But a recent round of cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to undermine all three of those supposed priorities.

On Tuesday, the Department of Labor (DOL) terminated more than two dozen grants to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology, and to fund programs to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and workplace harassment. The grants were administered by the Women’s Bureau, an office created by congressional mandate in 1920 to support women’s employment.

This article is based on communications with four current and former Labor Department employees familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau, and five of the affected grantees, some of whom also provided copies of termination notices. Experts and advocates say the cancellations will undermine women’s safe participation in the workforce at a time when Trump has promised “a boom like no other” and “millions and millions of new jobs.” They also threaten to reverse the progress women have made in the trades: Research conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR)—a Washington, DC, think tank that researches women’s employment—has found, for example, that the number of women working in construction grew by nearly 30 percent from 2018 to 2023. (Spokespeople for DOL, the Women’s Bureau, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

“A lot of these programs have been designed to help women get into the pipeline of some of these male-dominated jobs, and make those jobs safer places for women to be,” said Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at IWPR. “Any administration [would] value programs that help overcome these barriers…This is clearly not doing that.”

DOGE sees it differently. In a Tuesday night post on X, the office bragged about cutting millions “in wasteful DEI grants” at DOL, including cuts to “gender equity awareness training.”

But DOGE’s cuts may not be legal: The majority of the canceled Women’s Bureau grants are mandated by a bipartisan act of Congress passed in 1991 that aimed to........

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