Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has a variety of priorities, but earlier this month, the Republican floated an especially provocative idea: He wants seniors to delay their retirement plans, by at least a year, for the good of the country.
Oz said at the National Press Club last week that if older Americans could remain in the workforce, they’d help the economy and save the country money. Putting his best spin on the idea, the former television personality said seniors who push off retirement would gain “agency over their future” in exchange.
But many GOP officials don’t just want older Americans to stay in the workforce, they also want Americans at the other end of the age spectrum to join the workforce sooner.
“We need to focus on … getting people into the workforce even earlier,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier told Fox Business this week. “We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly.”
This isn’t an altogether new priority for the GOP. In the wake of the 2010 midterm elections, when so-called Tea Party Republicans were riding high, a surprising number of party officials took aim at an unexpected target: child labor laws. One might have assumed a generations-old national consensus had taken root, but no, many Republicans were eager for a new public conversation on the topic.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, suggested child labor laws might not be constitutional. Maine’s then-Gov. Paul LePage called for rolling back his state’s restrictions on children in the workplace. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa even argued that looser child labor laws might help combat childhood obesity.
Ahead of his ill-fated 2012 presidential campaign, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich went so far as to argue that existing child labor laws were, as he put it in 2011, “truly stupid.”
In time, the issue largely faded from the Republican Party’s to-do list, but in 2023, the issue started to make a comeback. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for example, signed a bill that made it easier for companies to hire children without getting consent from their parents. Similar efforts were launched in several other states.
When the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint was written two years ago, it specifically endorsed rolling back “hazard” regulations around child labor. Around the same time, as Uthmeier noted, Florida loosened its child labor laws at Gov. Ron DeSantis’ behest.
Time will tell whether other states follow suit, though the bigger picture tells an important story: The more Republicans scramble to remove immigrants from the workforce, the greater the pressure they’ll feel to replace those workers with seniors and kids.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
