Ondray Harris, the director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), has resigned after just eight months in this position. OFCCP audits government contractors across a wide range of industries to ensure compliance with workplace affirmative action and nondiscrimination laws. The Obama administration used OFCCP to apply radical views of anti-discrimination law to a vast swath of the nation’s employers.
Bloomberg reported the resignation. It stated that “the reason for Harris’ resignation wasn’t disclosed.”
I don’t know Harris at all and don’t know much about him, except that he is well-regarded by conservatives in Washington, D.C. I have no knowledge as to why he resigned.
However, I do know two things:
First, it is unusual for someone to resign from a position like this after such a short stay. Occasionally, someone will resign to take an attractive job in the private sector. However, the Bloomberg story indicates that this is not the case with Harris.
Second, under Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, the Labor Department has not reversed the radical course of the OFCCP set by the Obama administration under the hard-left leadership of Tom Perez. I discussed this failure in considerable detail in a post called “The Obama Department of Labor in its Tenth Year.”
Is there a connection between Alex Acosta’s unwillingness to take action that would alienate the left (an unwillingness that extends well beyond the OFCCP) and Ondray Harris’ resignation after just eight months? I don’t know. But it would be understandable if a strong conservative did not want to keep holding a leadership position in the tenth year of the Obama Department of Labor.
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