Between 2013 and 2023, an average of 24 children under 18 died each year in work-related incidents in the United States. A Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday found that over half of the 260 fatalities during that period were missing fundamental information — the industry the child worked in, the cause of death, or both. The federal government does not know how its children are dying at work because it has systematically failed to collect the data. The numbers that do exist are grim. Among the 109 fatalities where industry was recorded, 75% occurred in agriculture. Among the 111 with a recorded cause of death, two-thirds involved transportation incidents. These are not ambiguous categories — they point to specific, preventable hazards in specific sectors. But with more than half of cases unclassifiable, the picture is necessarily incomplete, and any policy response built on it is flying partially blind. The enforcement picture is no better. Between fiscal years 2015 and 2025, 59% of child labor law violations involved employers scheduling 14- and 15-year-olds to work longer or later than federal law permits. Sixty-two percent of violations occurred in accommodation and food services — restaurants and hotels putting children on illegal shifts. The Department of Labor's wage and hour division, the GAO found, "has not fully addressed" its own enforcement challenges. What makes the report genuinely alarming is the trajectory. The number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws jumped from 1,012 in fiscal year 2015 to 5,272 in fiscal year 2025 — a fivefold increase in a decade. Nineteen states have moved to relax child labor protections since 2021. The federal response to this acceleration has been to reduce capacity: since January 2025, DOL collaboration with other federal agencies on child labor enforcement has "largely diminished," according to the GAO. The data infrastructure itself is crumbling. A labor department survey and two other federal datasets that tracked child labor injuries have been discontinued. A methodological change in 2021 broke comparability with earlier injury and illness data, creating a gap in the time series at precisely the moment violations began surging. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which contributed to research in this area, has faced budget cuts. Representative Bobby Scott, who requested the GAO investigation in July 2023, described the result bluntly: the federal government cannot prevent child labor if it does not know where children are working or how they are being harmed. Scott has introduced the Protecting Children Act, aimed at improving data collection and enforcement coordination. Whether it advances in the current Congress is an open question. The structural problem the GAO report documents is not partisan in origin — data gaps predate the current administration — but the decision to further reduce inter-agency collaboration and research funding since January 2025 has actively widened them. The core finding is simple and damning: the United States has a child labor problem that is growing by every available measure, and it is simultaneously dismantling its ability to measure it. You cannot fix what you refuse to count.
