Elaine Chao
Elaine Lan Chao is an American businesswoman and former government official who served as United States secretary of labor in the administration of George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009 and as United States secretary of transportation in the first administration of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, Chao was the first Asian American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. She resigned as transportation secretary after the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
Chao was born in Taipei, Taiwan, to waishengren parents who fled China as a result of the Chinese Civil War. She immigrated to the United States when she was eight years old. Her father founded the Foremost Group, an American shipping company based in New York. Chao was raised in Queens, New York, and on Long Island, and received degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Harvard Business School. She worked for financial institutions before being appointed to senior positions in the Department of Transportation under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, including chair of the Federal Maritime Commission and Deputy Secretary of Transportation. She served as director of the Peace Corps from 1991 to 1992 and as president of the United Way of America from 1993 to 1996.
Chao has served on several Fortune 500 and nonprofit boards of directors, including the electric charger network provider ChargePoint since 2021. She was named a Kennedy Center trustee in January 2025. She is married to U.S. senator Mitch McConnell.
Early life and career
Elaine Chao was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 26, 1953, and immigrated to the United States when she was eight years old. She is the eldest of six daughters of Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, a historian from Anhui, and James S. C. Chao, a Shanghainese businessman who began his career as a merchant mariner and in 1964 founded the shipping company Foremost Maritime Corporation in New York City, which developed into the Foremost Group. In 1961, at the age of 8, Chao came to the United States on a 37-day freight ship journey along with her mother and two younger sisters. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier and sent money home until the rest of the family could join him in the United States.Chao described her early life in America as a typical immigrant story, noting that "everything was foreign to us: the culture, people, language, traditions, and even the food." She spoke no English upon her arrival. Her father "worked three jobs" to support the family and the then-five family members lived in a one-bedroom apartment.
Education
Chao attended Tsai Hsing Elementary School in Taiwan for kindergarten and first grade. She attended Syosset High School in Syosset, New York, in Nassau County on Long Island and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen at the age of 19.Chao received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In the second semester of her junior year, she studied money and banking at Dartmouth College. She received an MBA degree from Harvard Business School.
Early career
Before being appointed to government work, Chao was a vice president for syndications at Bank of America Capital Markets Group in San Francisco, and she was an international banker at Citicorp in New York. She was granted a White House Fellowship during the Reagan Administration.In 1986, Chao became Deputy Administrator of the Maritime Administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation. From 1988 to 1989, she served as chairwoman of the Federal Maritime Commission. In 1989, then-president George H.W. Bush nominated Chao to be Deputy Secretary of Transportation; she served from 1989 to 1991. From 1991 to 1992, she was the director of the Peace Corps. She was the first Asian American to serve in any of these positions. She expanded the Peace Corps' presence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia by establishing the first Peace Corps programs in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, including the first Peace Corps programs in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Russia.
Between Bush administrations
Following her service in President George H.W. Bush's administration, Chao worked from 1992 to 1996 as president and CEO of United Way of America. She was the first Asian American to hold that role. She is credited with returning credibility and public trust to the organization after a financial mismanagement scandal involving former president William Aramony. From 1996 until her appointment as Secretary of Labor, Chao worked at a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. She was also a board member of the Independent Women's Forum. She later returned to think tanks after leaving the government in January 2009.Chao delivered a speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention.
U.S. Secretary of Labor (2001–2009)
Chao was the only cabinet member in the George W. Bush administration to serve for the entirety of his eight years. She was also the longest-serving Secretary of Labor since Frances Perkins, who served from 1933 to 1945 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chao was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for her appointment as Secretary of Labor. Of Chao's staff, Victoria Lipnic, Assistant Secretary for Employment Standards Administration, later became Member, EEOC and acting chair.In 2004, the department issued revisions of the white-collar overtime regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Union disclosure requirements
In 2002, a major West Coast ports dispute costing the U.S. economy nearly $1billion daily was resolved when the Bush administration obtained a national emergency injunction against both the employers and the union under the Taft–Hartley Act for the first time since 1971. Led by Chao, in 2003, for the first time in more than 40 years, the department updated the labor union financial disclosure regulations under the Landrum–Griffin Act of 1959, which created more extensive disclosure requirements for union-sponsored pension plans and other trusts to prevent embezzlement or other financial mismanagement.Response to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Chao's Department of Labor disbursed grants to provide temporary jobs to assist in cleanup and restoration efforts in New York, as well as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's monitoring of health and safety of cleanup work being performed at the disaster sites including lower Manhattan. The department also provided unemployment insurance and income support to those who lost their jobs in the aftermath of September 11.Following the 2005 hurricane season, which included hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, the Labor Department disbursed nearly $380 million in grants to assist with cleanup work and provide benefits and services to those displaced by the storms. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration and other agencies deployed personnel to the region to provide safety training and uphold workers' rights. Chao set up an emergency response hotline dedicated to the Gulf Coast region for people seeking benefits and worker protection information.
Government Accountability Office reports
After analyzing 70,000 closed case files from 2005 to 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Department's Wage and Hour Division inadequately investigated complaints from low- and minimum-wage workers alleging that employers failed to pay the federal minimum wage, required overtime, and failed to issue a last paycheck. The Department of Labor responded that the GAO investigation focused on individual complaints while the department remained focused on resolving complex and multi-employee complaints; from 1997 to 2007 the annual number of employees receiving back wages as a result of DOL action almost doubled and the dollar amount of back wages paid more than doubled. The Washington Post echoed that Chao's department was criticized by some for "walking away from its regulatory function" but also praised by others for providing "compliance assistance" and "helping companies abide by the law" rather than "punitive enforcement that … stifles economic growth."A 2008 Government Accountability Office report noted that the Labor Department gave Congress inaccurate numbers which understated the expense of contracting out its employees' work to private firms during Chao's tenure, which may have affected 22 employees at the department.
Mining regulation
Chao and the Bush administration proposed quadrupling the fines imposed against mining corporations for mine safety breaches and sued mine operators for failing to maintain safe working conditions. A 2007 report by the department's Office of Inspector General found that mine safety regulators did not conduct federally required inspections at more than one in seven of the country's 731 underground coal mines in 2006, and that the number of worker deaths in mining accidents more than doubled to 47 in that year. The Mine Safety and Health Administration "missed 147 inspections at 107 mines employing a total of 7,500 workers".Mining disasters in 2006 and 2007 included West Virginia's Sago Mine explosion, which killed 12 in January 2006; West Virginia's Alma Mine fire, which killed two in January 2006; the Darby Mine No.1 explosion in Kentucky, where five miners died in May 2006; and the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse in Utah, which killed six workers and three rescuers in August 2007. Immediately following the Sago mine disaster, Secretary Chao vowed to "take the necessary steps to ensure that this never happens again".
In 2010, the widows of the two men killed in the Alma Mine fire sued the federal government for wrongful death, citing lack of inspections, failure to act against violations, and conflicts of interest. "MSHA's review of the fire acknowledged significant lapses by inspectors, supervisors and district managers" at the mine but the agency did not admit liability for the negligent inspections. In 2013, the appeals court ruled that MSHA can be held liable "when a negligent inspection results in the wrongful death of a coal miner". The suit was settled in 2014; MSHA also agreed to develop a training course on preventing fires in underground mines.