Davis-Bacon Penalties Down 94% vs. Biden Years

Federal worker protection cases and penalties collapsed in the first year of the Trump administration, part of a greater project that is killing regulations that protect workers and then failing to punish companies that violate the laws that remain.

Between 2009 and 2024, the number of cases brought by the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration held steady at about 375 per month.

In the first nine months of the second Trump administration, wage violation cases plummeted by 98%, to only nine cases a month.

And as cases nearly disappeared, penalties assessed to violators plunged.

These details come from the Department of Labor’s own statistics and were compiled in a report, “Worker Protections in Freefall,” prepared by the nonprofit Good Jobs First.

“This was not a miraculous change of heart in the American managerial class that stealing our wages and damaging our bodies is wrong,” said Government Affairs Director Dean Warsh. “Bad things don’t stop happening when the sheriff quits. That’s what they did. They closed their eyes and left the American worker to the wolves.”

The physical and financial injuries the Wage and Hour Division should be on the lookout for are some of the most devastating crimes committed against working people.

Financially, at least $19 billion is stolen from American workers every year by their employers, according to a 2019 study from the Economic Policy Institute.

That vastly exceeds all other kinds of theft — larceny, muggings, car thefts — combined.

Physically, out of a workforce of 165 million people, there are more than 3 million workplace-related injuries or deaths each year.

OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division were created to protect all workers from abuses that were simply common business practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Knee-capping law enforcement invites a return of those dark days, Warsh said.

“The incidence of these attacks on working people hasn’t dropped. Only the penalties have fallen,” Warsh said. “The chance of getting caught was already too low. Since Trump’s second inauguration, it’s fallen to just about zero.”

Some of the starkest collapses were in the areas of most interest to the IBEW’s construction members. One of the union’s critical tools to organize work is ensuring that the Department of Labor has accurate prevailing wage data.

Each year, business managers and international representatives spend hundreds of hours collecting and passing on wage information to the DOL to set wage standards for federal and federally funded construction projects covered by the Davis-Bacon Act.

The law was designed to keep publicly funded projects out of the hands of contractors that build low bids on underpaid, low-skilled and exploited workers. If a contractor can’t win by lowballing labor costs, it has to compete on the quality of the work, and that’s why the IBEW wins so many Davis-Bacon projects.

“Contractors that violate the Davis-Bacon Act are going to be the worst actors in our industry. They not only rip off their own workers, but they rip off the taxpaying public, pocket the premium for public projects and then lie about it,” said International President Kenneth W. Cooper.

According to the Wage and Hour Division’s statistics, the average penalties in the Obama administration for Davis-Bacon violations were about $27 million per year. In the first Trump administration, penalties averaged about $19 million. Under President Joe Biden, they averaged about $21 million.

In 2025, they were only about $1.3 million, which was down 95% from the Obama average, 94% from Biden and 93% from Trump’s first administration.

The Trump administration’s abandonment of working people is even worse than it looks because the starting point was already far too low. The DOL has been vastly underfunded and understaffed for decades.

The U.S. workforce has grown from about 107 million in 1980 to nearly 170 million in 2024, yet the DOL budget shrank in that time from $119 billion to $54.3 billion in real dollars.

The result is a cripplingly small force looking out for the interests of American workers. OSHA has one inspector for every 70,000 workers, while the Wage and Hour Division has one inspector for every 270,000.

Staffing for wage-and-hours enforcement is at the lowest level since the office was created, at only 611.

And its about to get worse.

OSHA is slated to lose 12% of its already depleted inspection workforce, according to the Good Jobs First report, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the workplace safety research agency that provides guidelines for OSHA, is facing an 80% cut in funding.

But reducing oversight, even this dramatically, is only half the story, said Construction and Maintenance Director Matt Paules.

“They are also slashing the laws that protect us from bad employers. They never hid it. They published a playbook — Project 2025. They are just doing what they said they would to kneecap labor protections,” he said.

Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump’s DOL has repealed at least 60 worker protections, including stopping enforcing rules against misclassification of independent contractors, ending the practice of seeking liquidated damages — remedies beyond back wages — for harmed workers and waiving civil penalties for employers who self-report wage violations.

It also stopped fining companies for delayed or incomplete wage payments and revoked a rule that increased the prevailing wage floor for federal contractors.

One of the most consequential changes for construction workers was expanding the definition of “small employers” that qualify for lower penalty rates to include businesses with up to 25 employees.

Although the pace has slowed somewhat, Warsh said, the Trump administration has plans to weaken worker protections further.

Proposed changes include removing construction lighting safety requirements, as well as narrowing respirator guidelines for asbestos and eliminating mandatory medical evaluations for workers who use respirators while working with asbestos or other carcinogens.

Of particular concern, he said, is a proposal to change the General Duty Clause, a catch-all provision for safety standards, to exclude activities that are “inseparable” from the work.

The change would limit the DOL’s ability to cite employers for injuries in industries where injuries are “part of the job.” At first, this would mostly mean entertainment and sports, but that’s not the ultimate aim, Paules said.

“The big prize would be expanding beyond these industries to any so-called high-risk profession, and that’s us square in the bomb sight,” he said. “There will always be contractors who throw up their hands and say danger is just ‘a part of our work.’ What they mean is they would rather sacrifice a worker than a dollar of profit.”

Finally, the DOL has proposed ending coordinated enforcement activities between the Wage and Hour Division and OSHA. In past administrations, the DOL discovered that companies that stole workers’ wages were more likely to put their workers’ safety at risk. Combining investigations made every scarce investigator more efficient.

“Workers will be cheated more, get hurt and die more. There will be fewer protections, fewer inspectors, and the ones that are left will be less effective,” Paules said.