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With White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt set to step down from her role at the end of the month, the question of who will replace her is looming over Washington.

Leavitt, 28, assumed the Press Secretary role at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term last January, becoming the youngest person to ever hold the position.

President Donald Trump announced Leavitt’s departure in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, saying that she would leave her role to focus on her family but that she would remain one of his “top advisors, and an influential voice within the Republican Party.”

Leavitt, who gave birth to her second child in May, thanked Trump in a lengthy post on X, in which she described her decision to focus on her two young children “bittersweet.” 

“I will always remain a vocal advocate for MAGA and the Republican Party,” Leavitt wrote. 

Read More: Karoline Leavitt’s Most Memorable Moments as White House Press Secretary

The White House has so far offered no further information on who might succeed Leavitt as Press Secretary. It redirected TIME to Leavitt and Trump’s posts when asked about candidates for the position, and has told multiple outlets that no decision has been made.

But some names are already being floated as possible contenders to take Leavitt’s place behind the White House podium. Here’s what you should  know about those potential replacements.

Alina Habba

Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba is reportedly being considered to take over as Press Secretary when Leavitt departs. 

The New York Post reported on Wednesday, citing sources within and close to the Administration, that Habba was an early frontrunner for the role.

Habba joined Trump’s legal team in 2021 and became a prominent public voice in his defense during the 2024 hush-money trial that resulted in his conviction on 34 felony counts. 

Trump said after his reelection that he was naming Habba as his presidential counsellor, and called her “a "tireless advocate for justice" and "unwavering in her loyalty.”

Following his return to the White House, Trump last year selected Habba for another position: the interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey. He later nominated her to serve in that role on a permanent basis, but her confirmation faced headwinds in the Senate and a panel of judges declined to extend her interim tenure, seeking to replace her. Trump and his Justice Department battled to keep her there, though, and he withdrew her nomination to clear the way for her to take on the position in an acting capacity.

Habba ultimately stepped down from the U.S. attorney post in December, after a federal court found that she had been unlawfully appointed. She thereafter moved into a role as Senior Advisor to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi. 

Matthew Boyle

Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief of conservative news outlet Breitbart, is also reported to be in the running. 

Sources in and close to the Administration told the Post that Boyle, like Habba, is a frontrunner to replace Leavitt. 

Boyle has never previously worked for Trump in either a private capacity or as part of his Administrations. He has conducted a number of interviews with him, however, including one in the Oval Office in June.

Scott Jennings 

Scott Jennings, a Trump defender and MAGA political commentator who frequently spars with Democrats on CNN, is another name that is reportedly at the top of the list of potential contenders.

Sources with knowledge of the situation told the Daily Beast that Jennings is the current frontrunner to succeed Leavitt. 

Jennings served as special assistant to the president under President George W. Bush and has worked on four presidential campaigns. 

He has also advised on campaigns for Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and former Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher.

Trump has publicly praised Jennings, who once was a critic of the President. 

“I think he's terrific: Scott Jennings,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last year. “He's defending me all the time on CNN.”

Anna Kelly 

Anna Kelly, who serves as the White House deputy secretary under Leavitt, has been raised as a potential candidate for the role from within the current White House communications team.

She previously worked as the national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, and for Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin.

Tricia McLaughlin 

Another name believed to be in the mix is Tricia McLaughlin.

McLaughlin became known as a fierce defender of Trump’s immigration policies as a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. She left her role in February. 

During Trump’s first term, McLaughlin also worked at the State and Treasury departments. She then became a communications chief for Gov. Mike DeWine’s 2022 reelection campaign and a senior communications advisor for Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Katie Miller 

Katie Miller, a conservative podcaster, former Trump staffer, and the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, has also been noted as a potential candidate for the Press Secretary role.

Miller served as the communication director for the shuttered Department of Government Efficiency last year.

Before that, she worked as an assistant press secretary at DHS during Trump’s first term. She left the position to serve as the communications director for former Republican Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, before becoming former Vice President Mike Pence’s communication director.

Steven Cheung

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung may also be a contender to become the next Press Secretary.

Cheung has worked alongside Trump in various capacities since his first Administration, during which he served as the White House assistant communications director. He was fired from the position in 2018 amid a staff shake-up, but went on to consult for Trump’s 2020 campaign. He also led communications for Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., and was Trump’s director of communications on his 2024 presidential campaign. 

Unions have a history of coming together when workers need them most. 

During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, labor unions sprang up in response to the harsh conditions of the industrial revolution. In the 1930s, a massive surge in union organizing helped the country find its way out of the Great Depression. Today, in our Second Gilded Age, gig work is leaving millions of Americans without access to a decent living. The question is: where are the unions now?

Look to the states.

This spring, 70,000 workers won a new union in Massachusetts, the largest union organizing victory since 1941. The new App Drivers Union is made up of rideshare workers who have been excluded from key workplace protections. What’s even more remarkable is that we are about to blow past this milestone. California recently enacted a law giving more than 800,000 drivers the same right to unionize, and last week the California Gig Workers Union won enough driver support to trigger recognition. If we embrace this model of industry-wide standard-setting, or “sectoral bargaining,” we could witness the beginning of a new era of expanding worker power.

That’s important because our labor laws are broken. Collective bargaining in the U.S. has happened primarily at the worksite level since the passage of the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935. Worksite bargaining remains the bedrock of building worker power. But decades of court decisions eroding workers' rights, relentless employer opposition, the exploitation of complex business structures, and worker misclassification have left worksite-by-worksite organizing incapable of reaching the vast majority of American workers. Union density, which once exceeded 30%, has fallen to historic lows, despite surging public interest in unions. The consequences are visible in decades of wage stagnation, widening inequality, and the erosion of the middle class.

 But we do have creative solutions to empower workers right now. Sectoral strategies, in which wages and working conditions are set across an entire industry rather than at an individual worksite, are powerful complements to worksite collective bargaining. For one thing, sectoral bargaining minimizes any competitive disadvantage that might otherwise come from paying workers the higher wages in collective bargaining agreements. In other words, it helps eliminate a race to the bottom and can remove one of the main reasons that employers in the U.S. fight unionization. 

Sectoral bargaining can also help build the organizing power that makes employer-level bargaining stronger. The sectoral model defines collective bargaining systems across the world—from Europe to South America to South Africa—in countries where labor unions still have the power to meaningfully redistribute wealth. It also explains why labor scholars and policy experts in the United States have shown a growing interest in sectoral bargaining in the last decade.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the AFL-CIO passed a landmark resolution at its annual conference last month endorsing sectoral bargaining for the first time in its history, embracing “opportunities to organize and bargain not just workplace by workplace but on an industrywide basis.” The federation's embrace of industry-wide standard-setting marks a turning point in how the American labor movement thinks about building worker power.

Federal labor law doesn’t provide for sectoral bargaining. Current judicial interpretation of the NLRA blocks states from adopting sectoral bargaining laws for most workers. But states do have the authority to provide sectoral bargaining for workers that the federal law has never covered: farm workers, domestic workers, gig workers, and delivery drivers treated as independent contractors regardless of how economically dependent they are on a single company. Those exclusions left space for Massachusetts and California to pass laws approving sectoral frameworks for rideshare drivers. These are powerful proof points. What has been missing is a comprehensive, replicable framework that any state can adopt today for targeted industries.

We worked with a team of labor law scholars, former federal labor officials, worker advocates, and union leaders to develop a Model State Sectoral Bargaining Law to meet this need. The model law would give workers the right to petition a State Labor Standards Board for recognition of a bargaining sector, grant organizing and access rights once minimum support thresholds are met, and create a process through which workers and employers can negotiate sector-wide agreements covering wages, benefits, working conditions, and the use of artificial intelligence and other workplace technology. Every employer in a covered sector would be bound by the resulting agreement, and workplace-level collective bargaining agreements may exceed—but never fall below—the sector-wide standards.

States that act now could immediately ensure that workers ignored by federal law can raise standards for themselves. More broadly, states have an opportunity to build the infrastructure of worker power that this country will need in the years ahead.

The tools we have are not equal to the moment we face. We believe the AFL-CIO's resolution is a signal that the labor movement knows it. But the major victories in Massachusetts and (soon) California provide a window into a way forward that includes state action granting sectoral bargaining rights. While federal law reform may well be needed in the long run, the Model State Sectoral Bargaining Law gives states somewhere to start. Workers have been waiting long enough.