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Sonderling, in First Interview After Confirmation, Lays Out Labor Department Workforce Mission

October 5, 2026 · USDepartmentofLabor · 0:08:18

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

In what the host presented as his first interview after Senate confirmation, Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said it was the honor of his life to serve as President Trump’s labor secretary and said the president’s commitment to the American worker is what inspires him, according to Sonderling (the transcript for this video is rendered in Arabic auto-captions and is paraphrased here in English).

Sonderling said the footprint he wants to leave is a department delivering results for American workers while the president brings industry and investment back to the United States, according to the interview. He said the Labor Department’s biggest challenge is making sure the workforce development system and the education system are aligned so American workers — and not others — can fill the new high-skill private-sector jobs being created, according to Sonderling.

Discussing the latest jobs report, the host cited 29,000 total jobs and 46,000 private-sector jobs, and played a clip of Kevin Hassett describing what he called Scott Bessent’s reprivatization of the economy and a cut of more than 300,000 federal workers, according to the broadcast. Sonderling said the president had promised both to right-size the federal government and to restore private-sector jobs lost under the prior administration, said private-sector job creation in Trump’s second term had passed one million, and said the month’s decline was driven by continued government job losses — exactly what the administration wanted to see while still running an effective government, according to Sonderling.

Why it matters

The interview is Sonderling’s stated mission statement on taking the confirmed post: workforce alignment as the bottleneck between announced investment and filled American jobs, as he presented it.

Sources: USDepartmentofLabor, “Secretary Keith Sonderling appears on Fox Business to discuss a variety of Labor Topics”, 2026-10-05 (official upload, embedded above; published 2026-10-05). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.