The Department of Labor’s Faith Leader Is Now Also in Charge of Its Civil Rights Enforcement

The person who leads The Department of Labor’s controversial monthly cults have now taken over one of the agency’s most important offices.

Kenneth Wolfe, director of the DOL’s Religious Center, now also heads the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the office responsible for ensuring that federal contractors comply with anti-discrimination laws. Wolfe’s appointment was quietly announced earlier this month, after the agency in April released its proposed 2027 budget, which would eliminate the office entirely.

Because it oversees federal contractors, the OFCCP had jurisdiction over “about 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. workforce,” says Keir Bickerstaffe, who was an attorney at the DOL for 16 years before leaving when former President Joe Biden’s term ended in January 2025. The OFCCP employed labor economists and statistical experts who could examine workforce data for discrimination, and its Lawyers could sue companies. “The OFCCP could obtain settlements on behalf of an entire class of people, it could seek to change company policies and practices to eliminate discrimination,” Bickerstaffe says.

For many years, it was the agency’s primary mechanism for enforcing civil rights laws.

Under President Donald Trump, however, OFCCP lost a significant number of employees through resignations and downsizing. In one of his first acts in 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “End Unlawful Discrimination and Restore Merit-Based Opportunity,” which directed all agencies to end all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” actions in government and “combat illegal private sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” This significantly weakened OFCCP’s law enforcement capabilities. Another executive order signed in March 2026, titled “Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors,” requires that federal contractors not engage in any DEI activities.

The DOL’s proposed new budget for 2027 cites the DEI Executive Order of 2025 as the reason for eliminating the OFCCP, writing that it was “responsible for enforcing some of these misguided activities and transfers its remaining statutory program areas to the newly created Office of Civil Rights.”

“Organizational consolidation is not a bad thing in theory,” says a DOL employee who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “But this is done in service of a clear agenda that inverts the idea of ​​civil rights.”

The DOL did not respond to questions about whether Wolfe would take a leadership role within the Office for Civil Rights once this consolidation occurs.

According to his LinkedIn, Wolfe’s experience is primarily in communications. He previously served as a speechwriter for a Republican congressman until 2003, before working in the Department of Health and Human Services’ office of communications. He doesn’t mention any legal experience, which was a red flag for Bickerstaffe: “I believe all of the former OFCCP directors, certainly the ones I worked with, had a legal background and specifically at least some sort of experience in civil rights law,” the former DOL attorney says.

The DOL did not respond to questions about Wolfe’s qualifications to lead the office, or his role in dissolving it over the next year.

Before assuming his new role, Wolfe was one of several government religious center directors who held monthly worship services. At a worship service, Pastor Leon Benjamin, a former Republican congressional candidate, told staffers that their job was to “make America understand that [work] is something God expects of us.

DOL employees who spoke to WIRED at the time said the religious services, which took place during the workday, made them uncomfortable.

There is, however, apparently one type of discrimination that the DOL continues to pay close attention to: In April, the agency announced that it would partner with the Department of Justice to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” Earlier this year, the agency released a tool that summarizes each state’s laws regarding religious discrimination in the workplace.