I have been reading the Inspector General report on former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and I have to confess: I am deeply disappointed. Not in Chavez-DeRemer, mind you. In the sheer, unadulterated lack of business acumen displayed by the federal government's internal watchdog. The report breathlessly accuses her of stoking dysfunction and toxicity, tolerating harassment, and spending Labor Department funds on personal travel. The media is treating this like a scandal. But anyone who has ever scaled a high-growth startup or navigated a hostile takeover looks at this exact same list of grievances and sees something else entirely: a visionary leader operating in founder mode.
It is time we admitted that the Department of Labor was long overdue for a little toxicity. For decades, the agency has been bogged down by a sluggish, overly empathetic culture. It was an organization obsessed with coddling the American workforce rather than optimizing it. Chavez-DeRemer looked at this sprawling, bloated bureaucracy and correctly identified that it lacked hustle. What the Inspector General calls dysfunction, the best founders I know simply call breaking down legacy silos to accelerate growth.
Let us first address the so-called misuse of department funds for personal travel. We are told she took government money to fly to destinations that had nothing to do with her official duties. To which I say: good. Capital allocation is the highest calling of any executive. If those funds were sitting idle in the agency coffers, waiting to be squandered on something trivial like OSHA compliance enforcement or investigating wage theft, they were generating zero return on investment. By redirecting that capital toward her own mobility and networking opportunities, she was optimizing her personal burn rate.
Let us look closer at those travel expenses. The report clutches its pearls over flights and luxury accommodations. But consider the alternative. Do we really want our top federal executives flying standby on budget airlines, waiting at baggage claim like common taxpayers? The mental bandwidth required to navigate a commercial terminal is bandwidth stolen directly from the American people. By chartering direct routes and prioritizing premium lodging, Chavez-DeRemer was protecting her most valuable asset: her decision-making capacity. If she happened to make those decisions poolside at a five-star resort in an unrelated time zone, that is merely the hallmark of a flexible, remote-first workflow.
Then there is the matter of tolerating harassment, a phrase that always sets off alarm bells for the professionally aggrieved. It is fascinating how the definition of a hostile work environment expands whenever employees are finally asked to deliver actual results. In the private sector, we call this radical candor. We call it pushing the envelope. We call it establishing a high-performance culture. If a few career bureaucrats felt uncomfortable because their new boss demanded excellence at all costs, that is not a scandal. That is the necessary friction of right-sizing a stagnant enterprise.
Furthermore, the accusation of stoking dysfunction completely ignores the strategic value of internal chaos. When departments are constantly infighting and employees are unsure of their standing, they cannot unionize against management. They cannot form cohesive alliances to push back against top-down directives. A divided workforce is a manageable workforce. Chavez-DeRemer did not accidentally create a toxic environment; she deployed dysfunction as a sophisticated management tool to bypass bureaucratic resistance. It takes a masterclass in psychological manipulation to turn a boring government agency into a real-time corporate survival game, and she executed it flawlessly.
What the public sector classifies as a toxic environment, the private sector recognizes as the baseline trauma required for synergistic growth.
I had a conversation recently at a private equity gala with a prominent Silicon Valley founder who told me he wishes he could run his company the way Chavez-DeRemer ran her department. He pointed out that in this economy, you cannot afford to waste time worrying about whether your middle managers feel emotionally supported. You have to drive the metrics. The fact that the Labor Department Inspector General chose to penalize her for creating a results-driven pressure cooker only proves that the federal government is effectively one giant, inescapable HR department.
We need to rethink our entire approach to public service leadership. The assumption has always been that the Department of Labor exists to advocate for labor. This is a semantic trap. The Department of Defense does not exist to defend our enemies; it exists to manage them. By that same logic, the Department of Labor should exist to manage labor, keeping it lean, hungry, and terrified. Chavez-DeRemer understood this implicitly. By stoking dysfunction within her own ranks, she was modeling the exact kind of precarious, edge-of-your-seat employment environment that keeps the broader American workforce competitive on a global scale.
We are entering an era of unprecedented global headwinds. We cannot afford to be sentimental about the emotional well-being of the civil service. When I look at the great American industrial titans, from Carnegie to the modern tech monopolies, none of them built their empires by fostering psychological safety. They built them by demanding the impossible and punishing failure with extreme prejudice. The Labor Department should be the ultimate showcase of American capitalism, reflecting the true, unvarnished reality of the free market back to the citizens. By making her employees miserable and spending their budget on herself, she gave them the most authentic private-sector experience possible.
I know from personal experience that sometimes a team needs to be destabilized to find its true potential. Early in my career, I fired my entire marketing department on a Tuesday afternoon simply because the office felt a bit too relaxed. The remaining staff were absolutely paralyzed with anxiety for the next six months. Do you know what happened? Our quarterly guidance was met with ruthless efficiency, largely because everyone was afraid to leave their desks to use the restroom. Toxicity is not a bug in the corporate operating system. It is the feature that prevents complacency.
The real tragedy of this Inspector General report is the chilling effect it will have on future government innovators. The next Labor Secretary will almost certainly overcorrect. They will fly commercial. They will listen to employee feedback. They will foster a collaborative environment where ideas are shared and boundaries are respected. And in doing so, they will doom the agency to another decade of mediocre, low-impact governance. The street would have rewarded Chavez-DeRemer for her ruthless optimization of the federal payroll. Instead, she is being hounded by oversight committees who cannot distinguish between a toxic workplace and a highly leveraged talent incubator.
It is entirely possible that Lori Chavez-DeRemer will step away from public service for good after this ordeal. If she does, the private sector will welcome her with open arms. A leader who knows how to extract maximum value while completely ignoring institutional guardrails is exactly what the modern boardroom is looking for. We should not be demanding her apology. We should be asking her for management consulting.