James' World 2

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Maternity-Leave Moola

My wife is a clinical social worker and therapist at an integrated health clinic in Massachusetts. This year, like other years, the staff recently received their year-end bonus. This bonus is a relatively paltry $1,000 and is standard across the staff, with no fluctuations based on merit. Everyone gets $1,000 (minus taxes). However, this year my wife took short-term medical leave. Her bonus was prorated to account for the time that she was on leave. Another woman, who was on maternity leave for part of the year, also received a prorated bonus. Is this discriminatory on the part of their employer or just unfair? Both these types of leave are perfectly legal and necessary and, speaking for my wife, enabled her to provide the best care that she could for her patients upon her return. Do these hardworking, dedicated women have any recourse to recoup the rest of their well-deserved bonuses?

— Disgruntled Husband, Massachusetts

It’s unfair, in my opinion, but in this case my opinion carries little weight. This is a legal question, and a very interesting — albeit complicated — one.

I spoke to Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, to get her take. Ms. Chettiar says that if there’s a prorated bonus and it’s clearly based on performance, then what your wife and her colleague experienced was legal.

But what does “performance” mean? Does going on medical or maternity leave mean a person has demonstrated a lesser performance than, say, someone who didn’t? The additional wrinkle here is that you say in general everyone gets the same bonus, so it’s unclear that it is in fact a performance-based bonus.

This is one of those gray-area examples where it comes down to interpretation of the law and the individual circumstance, and whether your wife is being treated the same as other people who took leave. For example, if workers who took leave for something other than disability or medical reasons did NOT have their bonuses prorated, Ms. Chettiar says, that would clearly be discrimination under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which make it illegal to retaliate against workers for being pregnant or because of pregnancy-related needs. In this case, however, it seems that your wife is being treated the same as her nonpregnant colleague.

Marylou Fabbo, an employment lawyer in Massachusetts, your home state, said it was important to know that there’s also the Family and Medical Leave Act, a federal statute that entitles

employees to take unpaid leave for specific medical or family-related reasons, which include a birth, a relative with health issues that require employee care or, as the website of Department of Labor says, “a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the essential functions of his or her job.” Massachusetts has a fairly new paid-leave law that is similar to that federal law, Ms. Fabbo added.

In this circumstance, she said, while the prorated bonus didn’t sound strictly discriminatory, it didn’t sound particularly fair.

She suggested that it would probably in your wife’s best interest to consult an employment lawyer just to be sure. A statute like the Family and Medical Leave Act would probably require an employer “to pay the full amount, depending on the laws that are applicable to the particular employee,” Ms. Fabbo said.

And if you’re worried that the legal fees would exceed the bonus amount, she pointed out that many employment statutes, including those related to discrimination or failure to pay wages, required the employer to pay the employee’s legal fees if the employee won the case.

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Credit…Photo illustration by Margeaux Walter for The New York Times

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CLIMATEWIRE | Congress’ oversight arm has issued an unprecedented warning about the risks facing federal disaster aid.

The Government Accountability Office said staffing levels and other workforce issues at the Federal Emergency Management Agency “has limited its capacity to provide effective disaster assistance.” It added that FEMA “needs to strengthen its disaster workforce by addressing staffing gaps.”

A staffing shortage that persisted from 2019 to 2022 “continues to grow” and left the agency with minimal staffing when Hurricane Milton hit Florida in October, days after Hurricane Helene deluged the state and large parts of the Southeast, GAO found.

The warning coincides with President Donald Trump’s threats to shutter FEMA, and it came two weeks after his administration fired at least 200 people from the agency.

The report marks the first time GAO put disaster aid on its annual “High-Risk List,” which highlights areas of the federal government that are “seriously vulnerable” to waste, fraud and abuse or need transformation. In addition to FEMA’s staffing problems, the report noted that “natural disasters have become costlier and more frequent.”

The GAO did not mention Trump or the FEMA firings that were carried out by his administration.

Trump, who has assailed FEMA’s response to flooding caused by Helene in western North Carolina, created a council to review whether the agency should be disbanded. It’s led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

FEMA staffing is only one problem the GAO found with disaster response. Others include the fragmentation of federal disaster response across more than 30 entities and a complex process for individuals to get emergency help after a disaster.

“Survivors face numerous challenges receiving needed aid, including lengthy and complex application review processes,” the GAO said, echoing a concern that has been raised for years. “Reforming the federal government’s approach to disaster recovery and reducing fragmentation could improve service delivery to disaster survivors.”

Numerous federal entities provide disaster aid, including the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and the Small Business Administration.

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When I was 17 in the late 1980s, I fell in love with a boy from work. He was 19 and from another country and when our work time was over, he had to fly home. What followed were many love letters (international phone calls were far too expensive then), every one of which I saw as fiercely romantic.

One day about six months into the relationship, a letter was waiting for me at home. My long-distance boyfriend often addressed letters with silly names or in-jokes. This time, he addressed the letter to “Mrs. [his last name].” My mother got very serious. She told me that this was possessive and too serious for our age, and that I had to write him a letter to break up with him immediately. I did, but I was still in love. Secretly, I kept writing the letters. I thought being “Mrs.” was romantic, and my mom was overreacting.

At age 21, after five years of separation by an ocean, I started an in-person relationship with him. It was deep and real love—or so I thought. By 24, I was being so emotionally abused and physically threatened, I barely knew my own name. This is how it happens. I was frozen and couldn’t seem to reconcile the dichotomy of my own life. I was deeply in love but was very confused by these behaviors because he would tell me how much he loved me while he was doing them. I was smart and educated. I knew about domestic violence, and I knew what he was doing was wrong, but no one had told me how to actually handle it—the frozenness, the confusion, and the gaslighting. Mostly, what I’d learned from a society that blames women for staying is that, if I stayed or still loved him, the abuse was my own fault.

Intimate partner violence is the number one cause of serious injury or death of women ages 18 to 24 in America, according to a 2018 statement released by the American College of Surgeons, and homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S. If it’s shocking to you to hear that, then it’s time to pay attention. This trend also applies to adolescent girls, who are being murdered by their intimate partners in increasingly dangerous numbers. A study from 2019 looked at homicide rates for teens and 7% were murdered by their partner, whether current or former.

Adolescence is a critical developmental time when young people are more vulnerable to societal pressures. A rise in misogyny (such as the recent explosion of “your body, my choice” as a slogan boys and men say), a marked increase in forced and violent sex for girls, and a culture that views rape prevention as a girls’ issue versus a boys’ issue is setting the stage for the already-large teen mental health epidemic to worsen.

Teen dating violence (TDV) is a type of intimate partner violence (IPV) that includes behaviors such as “physical violence, sexual violence and coercion, psychological aggression, and stalking” and is associated with an increased risk for further intimate partner violence, depression and anxiety, mental and physical illness, substance use, and suicidal ideation. In 2025, at least 1 in 3 girls in the U.S. have experienced teen dating violence according to the organization Love Is Respect, and it’s affecting them at dangerously high levels.

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Hmmmmm… Hood->Robin Administration?

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CLIMATEWIRE | Lawmakers and officials from Western states are warning that President Donald Trump’s firings and funding freezes will leave the region woefully unprepared for the coming wildfire season, just two months after blazes ravaged Los Angeles.

The new administration’s moves to terminate nearly 10 percent of Forest Service personnel and pause grants intended to reduce the risk and intensity of fires have left states scrambling to make sure they don’t lose valuable preparation time. The uncertainty is coming during a period when the Forest Service and state governments would normally be doing crucial work such as creating fire breaks, carrying out controlled burns, thinning trees and clearing brush.

“These cuts are clobbering rural Oregon,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “This is going to make it extraordinarily difficult to get a balanced approach on natural resources.”

The pullbacks represent a major change from the Biden administration, which poured more than $3 billion into wildfire prevention. They are also notable given that Trump has repeatedly faulted Western officials for not doing enough on forest management dating back to his first term.

Record drought, heat waves and sluggish forest management in both state and federal forests have exacerbated fires in recent decades: An average of 3 million acres burned nationwide each year in the 1990s, but now, the average is nearly 7 million, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.

While the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, now appears ready to unfreeze some wildfire mitigation funding, cuts have stalled active forest management projects, delayed wildfire training, and raised concerns that bipartisan legislation already passed this Congress could fail to help. And even though direct firefighters are exempt from the Forest Service cuts, many of the 3,400 workers fired at the agency supported in trail maintenance, fuels reduction and other forestry projects just as summer hirings would start in preparation for wildfire season.

“The threat of these changes is significant,” said Vicki Christiansen, who served as Forest Service chief during Trump’s first term. “$40 million in savings now just to have an additional $4 billion in wildfire expenses is crazy.”

The Forest Service is responsible for some 193 million acres of forests and grasslands — the majority of it in the West. Federal reductions could force states with large swaths of Forest Service land to do more to manage or respond to incidents.

State and local officials in Nevada, California, Utah and Washington state said they are now looking to their own state budgets to cobble together resources. Utah and Oregon already are working to expand state forest management funding. Other states, like Washington, are trimming their own budgets and have no surplus to use to make up for a gap in federal funding. Every state said there is no way they can fully patch the hole left by the federal government.

Nevada State Forester and Firewarden Kacey KC said a big worry is staffing emergency management teams with dispatchers, technicians and GIS workers, none of whom would likely qualify for the exemption for direct firefighters but are still a vital part of wildfire prevention and mitigation. KC, who was appointed by former Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval and works in a state where 86 percent of the land is federally owned, is already talking about a “Plan B” to exercise her agency’s authority to make emergency hires.

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Hmmmmm… Hood->Robin Administration?

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Gender expression can come in many forms, but for a kid I’ll call Sarah, it first came in the form of a pair of owl pajamas. They were soft cotton, with wide-eyed owls cavorting on a pink background, and at 18 months old, Sarah would wriggle her way out of her “boy” clothes and into the pajamas as soon as she got home from preschool, toddling back into the living room pleased as punch with herself. “She was so, so determined,” says Sarah’s parent Ingrid (who has asked in this article to go by her middle name). “Like, ‘No, this is actually what I want.’”

At age two, Sarah came across a rack of dresses hanging outside a store and tried to put one on right there on the sidewalk (“You look beautiful,” an older woman said in passing, to Ingrid’s relief). At three, according to Ingrid, Sarah began to “socially transition herself,” asking to grow her hair out, gravitating in the aisles of Target toward sparkly dresses in hues of Pepto-Bismol pink and to anything having to do with unicorns. In kindergarten, Sarah said she wanted to change her pronouns. In first grade, she said she wanted to change her name. Somewhere along the way, her parents went to see some specialists to ask for advice on how to handle what was clearly not just a phase: “We were like, ‘Well, this thing seems to be a thing. What do we do to not mess her up?’ And they were like, ‘Just give her space, make sure she’s safe, and let her lead.’ And so that’s what we’ve [done].” 

They also began to join listservs for the families of transgender children, tapping into a network of fellow New York City parents who had experience navigating some of the parenting concerns specific to raising a trans child. There were meetups and playdates and support groups. There was also information about medical providers and timelines. It was understood that not every trans child would want or require medical care — especially when it comes to a generation of children that, more than previous generations, understand gender to be both a spectrum and a construct. But it was also understood that trans kids were significantly more likely than their cisgender peers to die by suicide. A national 2022 study conducted by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention, found that more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered suicide in that year alone. Another study, published this past September in the journal Nature Human Behavior, linked those rates not to something inherent in trans identity but instead to trans acceptance in the broader culture: In states that passed anti-trans legislation, including bans on gender-affirming care, suicide attempts by transgender teenagers could increase by as much as 72 percent in the years after the ban went into effect. It stood to reason that for children who experience gender dysphoria, or distress over the disconnect between their biological sex and their gender identity, even offering them possibility of not having to grow into an unwelcome body could buttress their mental health. Sarah’s parents had noticed that each step she took in transitioning seemed to calm her, to make her more “settled,” as Ingrid puts it. As Sarah approached the age of puberty, they began to carefully broach the subject of what she could expect. “I mean, who wants to talk about puberty with their parents?” asks Ingrid. “We were just like, ‘You’re going to enter this thing called puberty pretty soon. Right now, your puberty will have you end up in a boy body, but there’s these different options. If you want to, we can pause it until you figure out if you want a girl body or a boy body.’” Sarah was adamant that she already knew: She was not a boy; she did not want to end up in a boy body. Her parents booked an informational appointment with the Transgender Youth Health Program at NYU Langone’s children’s hospital, one of the world’s most well-regarded gender-affirming-care practices at one of the world’s premier medical institutions.

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Lindsey Wasson/AP

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Hmmmmm… Hood->Robin Administration?

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Good morning. Hallam Bullock here, writing to you from London. Our US team is observing Presidents’ Day, so I’m bringing you a shorter version of the newsletter.

In case you missed it, Jamie Dimon’s comments on work-from-home last week went viral. In a leaked recording, the JPMorgan CEO explained to staffers why remote work is a detriment to his company — using language that was at times colorful and confrontational.

However, copies of the audio obtained by BI suggest that remote work was just a sliver of the conversation. Dimon also addressed a wide range of issues, including the impact of AI, reducing corporate bureaucracy, and the bank’s fintech failings.

In today’s big story, many federal workers have expressed outrage and despair at President Donald Trump’s workforce mandates — but what do the ones who voted for him think? BI spoke with four Trump-supporting federal workers to find out.

The big story

Trump’s workforce blitz

“It shouldn’t have come to this.”

That’s what one federal worker who voted for Trump told BI amid the president’s ongoing efforts to reduce the federal workforce. And no, they haven’t changed their stance on supporting Trump.

As of last Thursday, about 75,000 federal employees had accepted the president’s buyout offer. That’s about 3.75% of the federal workforce, inching closer to the White House’s goal of reducing the federal staff count by 5 – 10%.

It’s a strange position to imagine yourself in: voting for a president who, weeks into his new administration, places your livelihood at risk.

But this is the exact scenario some federal workers are now facing.

Four of those workers spoke to BI’s Ana Altchek and Ayelet Sheffey about how they’re feeling.

“I voted for Trump. I wanted to see some positive change,” one federal employee of 17 years said. But they didn’t know that change could put their job in jeopardy.

Some of the workers BI spoke with are still standing by the overall mission to reduce government waste.

“They’re uncovering a lot of waste and abuse there,” one worker said. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that they’re finding which is a total waste of taxpayer money.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE has been targeting federal agencies it deems wasteful to lower government spending. In the weeks since Trump took office for the second time, DOGE has applied Silicon Valley’s “slash and burn” mentality to multiple agencies, including USAID.

Some of the workers BI spoke with are still standing by the overall mission to reduce government waste.

“They’re uncovering a lot of waste and abuse there,” one worker said. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that they’re finding which is a total waste of taxpayer money.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE has been targeting federal agencies it deems wasteful to lower government spending. In the weeks since Trump took office for the second time, DOGE has applied Silicon Valley’s “slash and burn” mentality to multiple agencies, including USAID.

Read everything the workers said here.

Many federal workers have expressed outrage and despair at President Donald Trump’s workforce mandates — but what about those who filled in the bubble next to his name on the ballot?

“I voted for Trump. I wanted to see some positive change,” a federal employee of 17 years told Business Insider, adding that they didn’t know that change would put them at risk of losing their job.

While some of the hot-button issues Trump is tackling, such as eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and cutting spending, may resonate with right-leaning workers, policies such as remote work and cutting the government’s head count haven’t traditionally been partisan matters.

As of Thursday, about 75,000 federal employees had accepted the president’s buyout offer. That’s about 3.75% of the federal workforce, inching closer to the White House’s goal of reducing the federal staff count by 5% to 10%.

Four federal employees who said they voted for Trump spoke with Business Insider about their feelings on his approach to the federal workforce. BI granted their requests for anonymity and verified their identities.

Trump supporters said they stood by the cost-cutting mission

While the federal workers BI spoke with said they didn’t fully support certain policies affecting them, some stood by the overall mission to reduce government waste.

One federal worker said they didn’t understand why some government agencies had so many employees.

“They’re uncovering a lot of waste and abuse there,” the worker said about the Department of Government Efficiency. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that they’re finding which is a total waste of taxpayer money.”

Elon Musk, who leads DOGE — a Trump-created commission aimed at slashing government waste — has vowed to target a range of existing federal programs, including expired spending authorization that goes to veterans’ healthcare and NASA.

“This is the reason why people voted for Trump,” the worker said. “Because what is the government doing? Why aren’t they forthcoming? Why? People want answers.”

While the worker said they understood why some people might be annoyed to return to the office full time, they said that “somebody needs to put their foot down.”

Another federal worker said they disagreed with focusing on federal workers without better understanding the various programs and the need for federal employees to keep them going. That said, they added that they saw value in looking at where money was being spent and that they were overall supportive of Trump.

For example, the worker said they supported the administration’s approach with the US Agency for International Development. Trump and Musk have both called USAID out over wastefulness and supporting liberal causes. A federal judge blocked Trump’s funding freeze on the agency and his attempt to put thousands of workers on leave.

USAID spent $32.5 billion in global aid in 2024. About a quarter of the money went toward humanitarian efforts, another quarter went to health and population initiatives, and additional funds were directed toward governance and administrative expenses.

“I think overall we’re going to end up better off with him as a president,” the worker said.

Some had concerns about targeting the federal workforce

The 17-year federal employee said they voted for Trump thinking he would help the economy and struggling Americans. Now, the worker said, they feel as if the president is making things worse by putting federal workers’ livelihoods at risk.

“Do Trump and Musk know the whole situation of every federal building? I don’t think they’re making proper choices,” the worker said.

They added that while they agreed with Trump’s goal to cut government waste, they didn’t agree that cutting the federal workforce and requiring all employees to return to the office full time was an effective approach.

Another federal worker said they voted for Trump twice and “had hope that he would fulfill his promises,” but that hope disappeared after the administration’s deferred resignation offers. The Office of Personnel Management offered federal employees the option to resign and receive pay through September, but this offer is now on pause because of ongoing litigation.

One worker said the way they’d gone about the federal workforce changes was a “little disconcerting.” The worker said that while they understood Musk was only there for so long, it seemed as if they were “getting rid of people very quickly.”

The worker also had concerns about returning to work in person because they moved out of DC, saying it would be a financial burden to return to the office.

A federal worker said they reached out to their senators and congressman and told them that “demonizing the federal workforce is not good.” They said federal workers have performance reviews, meet with supervisors, and act in compliance with their mission.

“Don’t take it out on us just because of the bad behavior of the prior administration,” the worker said, adding that they hadn’t changed their stance on supporting Trump because “it shouldn’t have come to this.”

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President-elect Donald Trump said he is not concerned about the potential conflicts of interest posed by Elon Musk’s work on DOGE. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

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Few voters likely expected President Donald Trump in the first weeks of his administration to slash billions of dollars from the nation’s premier federal cancer research agency.

But funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health were presaged in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a conservative plan for governing that Trump said he knew nothing about during his campaign. Now, his administration has embraced it.

The 922-page playbook compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, says “the NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken” and calls for capping payments to universities and their hospitals to “help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.”

Universities, now slated to face sweeping cuts in agency grants that cover these overhead costs, say the policy will destroy ongoing and future biomedical science. A federal judge temporarily halted the cuts to medical research on Feb. 10 after they drew legal challenges from medical institutions and 22 states.

Project 2025 as Prologue

The rapid-fire adoption of many of Project 2025’s objectives indicates that Trump acolytes — many of its contributors were veterans of his first term, and some have joined his second administration — have for years quietly laid the groundwork to disrupt the national health system. That runs counter to Trump’s insistence on the campaign trail, after Democrats made Project 2025 a potent attack line, that he was ignorant of the document.

“I have no idea what Project 2025 is,” Trump said Oct. 31 at a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of many times he disclaimed any knowledge of the plan. “I’ve never read it, and I never will.”

But because his administration is hewing to the Heritage Foundation-compiled playbook so closely, opposition groups and some state Democratic leaders say they’re able to act swiftly to counter Trump’s moves in court.

They’re now preparing for Trump to act on Project 2025 recommendations for some of the nation’s largest and most important health programs, including Medicaid and Medicare, and for federal health agencies.

“There has been a lot of planning on the litigation side to challenge the executive orders and other early actions from a lot of different organizations,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group. “Project 2025 allowed for some preparation.”

The plan, for example, calls for state flexibility to impose premiums for some beneficiaries, work requirements, and lifetime caps or time limits on Medicaid coverage for some enrollees in the program for low-income and disabled Americans, which could lead to a surge in the number of uninsured after the Biden administration vastly expanded the program’s coverage.

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A few years ago, my mother’s home was flooded and very badly damaged. During a cold New England weekend, a pipe burst in the attic. Water made its way through the entire house, soaking the carpets and the walls. Water found its way into the kitchen cabinets and seeped into pictures and paintings. As I  frantically rummaged through my childhood bedroom to see what I could save, I was amazed at how many things I had once carefully wrapped away. Childhood charm bracelets, my prized Benetton t-shirt, a small wooden jewelry box, a seashell necklace, two porcelain dolls, and a box of other items.

While we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, I valued whatever we received. Every gift I received was cherished like a priceless item I could never find again. Every toy, chachki, and knick knack felt like that giant blue pendant necklace tossed into the ocean in the movie Titanic because I knew my parents wouldn’t have the money to buy me another one if it was lost or broken.

My children are growing up in a different world. “Mom, this broke,” my kids will say. “I need another one ordered on Amazon.” 

As a dual career household, trying to manage traveling to a client, making sure there are string cheeses stocked in the fridge, finishing that work proposal, searching for a sports jersey for school, responding to emails from the boss, and helping with the science fair project that becomes your own—I often relent and just give up. My husband will try to give them a lecture on the value of

money (and the belongings money buys) as I race onto the next thing to do. I will quickly order whatever they have broken, lost, or need another of, as I race around looking for the right sized poster board for another school project.

As a child, I knew my parents often lived in survival mode. My dad was the primary breadwinner and worked as a mechanical engineer. My mother stayed home and was our chef, teacher, Uber driver, nurse, cleaning service, and more. She was also the bookkeeper, watching our finances carefully, cutting up dozens and dozens of coupons, paying only in cash for what we could afford, standing in line in cold weather with her best friend for hours to get the best deals on toys for Christmas. 

My Indian immigrant parents had left everyone and everything they knew behind for a life in a strange new land. They had no support system in the U.S. If they couldn’t pay their bills, there was no one to help them. They hustled, sometimes living paycheck-to-paycheck, and sacrificed a lot for my younger brother and I. There were times when my dad almost lost his job, we moved a number of times (I went to four different high schools), and we knew when finances were tight. While my parents were transparent with us about finances, and sometimes I felt anxiety over it. But it also set expectations, taught us the value of things, and established in us a strong understanding of money. 

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Jordan Lye—Getty Images

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CLIMATEWIRE | A number of safety documents containing the word “diversity” were removed from the Department of Labor website. But they weren’t the kind of racial and gender diversity programs that the Department of Government Efficiency has been targeting.

Instead, they dealt with the diverse size and shape of firefighters — a detail that helps them properly fit into safety equipment like ventilator masks. Another document that was taken down pointed to the diverse set of situations that first responders might be working in.

Their removal was prompted by President Donald Trump’s executive order to end federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives, as well as White House missives to stop promoting “gender ideology.”

The Trump administration has been searching for those terms in programs, grants, and documents to trigger funding freezes and to shutter initiatives aimed at counteracting discrimination based on people’s race, gender and disabilities.

Larges swaths of government webpages have been taken offline in the past month as a result. That includes a 2015 guide from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an arm of the Labor Department, about restroom access for transgender workers. The removed document cited OSHA’s sanitation standard requiring employers to provide workers with toilet facilities.

Accessed via the Internet Archive, the 2015 guide notes that OSHA has long interpreted that standard to mean that “employers may not impose unreasonable restrictions on employee use of toilet facilities.” It also explains that “bathroom restrictions can result in employees avoiding using restrooms entirely while at work, which can lead to potentially serious physical injury or illness.”

Other documents that were removed include guidance for first responders when they treat and transport victims of chemical releases and guidance for small businesses about what personal protective equipment, such as respirators, they should use in diverse scenarios.

OSHA did not respond to requests for comment. But emails obtained by the website Popular Information show OSHA public affairs officials announcing to agency staff that the publications were removed from the website and will not be distributed from OSHA’s warehouse. The Feb. 7 email said, “if you have wallet cards that include language, or can be interpreted, on DEIA or gender ideology, please dispose of them as well.”

The purge has caught the attention of lawmakers. House Democrats on the Education and Workforce Committee wrote a letter to Vince Micone, acting secretary of Labor, to raise their concerns last week.

“If erasing these documents relates to President Trump’s executive orders on so-called ‘gender ideology’ and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’ DOL appears to be implementing the orders as though there is a list of banned words, without any regard for the context in which the words are used,” they wrote.

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After my daughter was born nearly four years ago, I decided that I wanted to breastfeed for one year. It was a challenging journey for so many reasons, but I can tell you with absolute certainty what made it possible: The fact that at the time, I worked a fully remote job. I never had to squeeze in a cramped room to pump milk at the office or commute to work with painfully clogged ducts. 

These circumstances are among the reasons that some moms and other breastfeeding parents don’t return to their jobs after giving birth—or end up quitting breastfeeding before they are ready so that they don’t lose their jobs. As one mom recently explained, these working conditions are simply unfair and untenable for parents. 

Breastfeeding Mom Finds Herself in Difficult Position at Work

In a rant posted to Reddit, the mom in question wrote that her 7.5-month-old baby has never taken a bottle. It was never a problem for her, as she worked from home. But after her previous manager left the company, she was told she would need to start coming into the office at least twice a week.

The new arrangement has already proved challenging for both mom and baby. She claims the first day she went back into the office, her baby didn’t eat for 10 hours. According to her replies in the comments, she’s tried a straw cup, introducing more solids, and “every sort of bottle and nipple flow out there” without much success. 

The mom now feels like the sudden change in expectations at work is totally unjustified, given that she rarely has meetings and has proven to be an efficient and competent worker who can function without issue from her home. “I’m just so disgusted and fed up with how corporate America treats mothers.”

Multiple commenters agree that the company was “just trying to make you quit,” as one person put it. Others tried offering suggestions, which included leaving that company altogether.

“I’d start putting out some resumes and get ready to leave to a more flexible job. Or look at a daycare near work instead where you can maybe pop over to feed her there,” wrote another commenter. 

Mom doesn’t want to leave her current job, even though her work schedule is so incompatible with her ability to parent, writing that “the thought of trying to get another job with the job market how it is right now sounds absolutely exhausting.” But with being the only full-time income in her family, she has no choice but to work, even though, as she put it, “being back to work with a 6-week-old is just criminal.” 

Why Working Conditions Are Unfair for New Parents

She’s not the first mom to feel pulled impossibly between work and parenthood. The phenomenon that she, and so many other mothers face, is called the motherhood penalty, in which moms returning to work are less likely to get promoted, are paid less than non-parents, and are deemed less competent and committed to their jobs than their counterparts without kids. But as a lot of parents know, parenting is one of the most valuable job skills there is.

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