A White House official defended the purge, calling the three women who lost their jobs "far-left appointees with radical records of upending longstanding labor law."

President Donald Trump has fired two of the three Democratic commissioners of the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws in the workplace, an unprecedented move aimed at implementing his crackdown on certain diversity and gender rights policies.

The Democratic commissioners hadn't completed their terms before the White House notified them that they were being removed.