In mid-December, the nation’s leading workplace civil rights enforcer took to social media to pose a question: “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?”
Andrea Lucas, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, appeared in the video, urging those who have to contact the agency “as soon as possible.”
“You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws,” she says in the video, which has amassed nearly 6 million views on X.
It was an unusual move, because the EEOC doesn’t typically solicit complaints. But it underscores the sea change at an agency central to President Donald Trump’s civil rights agenda — one that began with executive orders gutting the last vestiges of affirmative action, and buttressed by his purge of the EEOC board and a newly installed Republican majority.
Now “fully empowered,” the agency will focus on stamping out “illegal discrimination” stemming from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and “anti-American bias,” Lucas said recently in written responses to questions from The Washington Post. Enforcement, including a heightened emphasis on pregnancy and religious bias, will stress “individual rights over group rights” she said, and eschew identity politics.
The EEOC’s new priorities come during a year of regulatory uncertainty — it lacked a quorum most of the year, limiting its functions — fueling confusion and uncertainty for employers, workplace experts say. And civil rights advocates contend this pivot detracts from its mission.
“Chair Lucas has chosen to elevate an asserted concern that lacks empirical support as a significant and widespread problem,” EEO Leaders said in a statement Dec. 23, “diverting scarce enforcement resources from well documented and pervasive forms of workplace discrimination that harm millions of workers in America today.” The group comprises former EEOC and Department of Labor officials.
Lucas said her X post reflects the agency’s effort to “correct underreporting” of forms of discrimination that were neglected by the past administration, adding that “for too long, many employees thought they weren’t the “right” kind of plaintiff, that our civil rights laws only protected certain groups, rather than all Americans.”
A restrained year
Founded in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights movement, the EEOC is charged with enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a worker or job applicant on the basis of race, sex, religion, age, disability and other factors. Most employers with at least 15 employees are bound by EEOC regulations, which apply to such workplace practices as hiring, firing, promotions and wages. The agency has recouped billions in monetary rewards for victims of workplace bias and harassment during the past decade.
Days into his second term — in a break from precedent — Trump dismissed two Democratic members of the independent commission. As a result, it lost the quorum needed to pursue certain cases and overhaul guidance. That changed in October with the appointment of Commissioner Brittany Panuccio, who with Lucas gave the panel a 2-1 GOP majority and a quorum. Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, a Democrat, rounds out the commission.
In past administrations, the EEOC typically filed 200 to 300 merit lawsuits — those in which the agency determined discrimination exists — a year, said Christopher DeGroff, an employment attorney with the firm Seyfarth Shaw. The 93 merit suits the agency filed in fiscal 2025 marked one of its lowest tallies in three decades, he noted in an analysisof its activity.
Still, the agency’s new priorities were evident in the cases that reached a public resolution or culminated in a lawsuit, DeGroff said. Merit suits alleging discrimination based on race or national origin — historically one of the EEOC’s busiest enforcement areas — hit a decade-low in 2025, his research noted. And two of the three cases filed revolved around anti-American bias.
Meanwhile, 37 of the 93 merit lawsuits the EEOC brought pertained to sex or pregnancy discrimination. Of those, 10 were filed under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and/or the newly enacted Pregnant Workers’ Fairness Act, and included lawsuits against Delta Air Lines and meat processor Smithfield alleging they denied accommodations to pregnant employees.
Religious bias lawsuits were another focus in 2025, with the agency filing 11 merit suits asserting religious discrimination or failure to accommodate religious beliefs. One case was against Apple, over allegations it failed to accommodate a Jewish employee’s request not to work on the weekend due to his faith.
Apple declined to discuss the case but “strongly denied” the claims in a statement to The Post.
Disparate impact
One of the EEOC’s biggest pivots under Trump is to abandon cases filed under disparate impact, a legal theory that holds that seemingly neutral policies — such as height or lifting requirements — can have discriminatory outcomes. It stems from the Supreme Court’s landmark 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power, where attorneys used statistical evidence to show how standardized tests prevented Black employees from advancing at a North Carolina energy company.
Disparate impact is central to civil rights litigation and a key lens though which the EEOC has tackled systemic discrimination, said Jenny Yang, who served as EEOC chair during the Obama administration and worked to expand the agency’s tool kit for addressing systemic discrimination.
In 2020 for example, Walmart settled a nationwide discrimination lawsuitbrought by the EEOC over a “physical ability test” it used for grocery workers that “disproportionately excludes female applicants.” Walmart agreed to stop using the test and to pay $20 million into a settlement fund for women who were denied grocery order-filler positions because of the testing.
Disparate impact “advances the core principle that removing unjustified barriers to opportunity helps all Americans thrive,” Yang said.
In April, Trump signed an executive order barring use of disparate impact by agencies, calling it a “pernicious movement” that ignores “individual strengths, effort or achievement.” Dan Lennington, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative think tank specializing in workplace issues, said the debate reflects the broader ideological divide on how to best protect workers’ civil rights.
“The minute you start saying all Black people this, all Hispanic people this, all women this, you’re just stereotyping,” he added. “The only thing that matters is the individual in front of you.”
Yang said it’s been “challenging” to see the Trump administration make such changes to an agency that historically ” really valued its bipartisanship and its independence to interpret antidiscrimination laws.” By moving away from disparate impact and targeting corporate diversity efforts, Yang said the EEOC has been “weaponized to intimidate employers, to retreat from efforts designed to promote equal opportunity, and to really abandon its historic mission to protect some of our most vulnerable workers.”
“Illegal” DEI
Shawna Bray, general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank, said that Lucas’ EEOC is correcting for past administrations that “used the tools in the toolbox to push things up to, and even over, the line because of their goals,” especially with DEI and other social issues.
DEI refers to practices companies use to ensure equal opportunity in their ranks, from recruiting and mentorship programs, to antibias training and employee resource groups. Many companies began reconsidering such policies after the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision rejecting the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
The ruling sparked a wave of activist lawsuits aiming to replicate the order in the employment sphere. Much of corporate America has since opened identity-based programs, such as fellowships and employee resource groups, to people of all backgrounds, ended efforts like antibias training, and rebranded DEI programs with a focus on “belonging.”
Lucas and others in the Trump administration often refer to “illegal DEI,” but Bray said that she finds the term “a little frustrating” given that such programs only break the law if they show identity-based preference. She also thinks the phrasing has created confusion.
The EEOC should “have in mind an even application of our civil rights,” regardless of factors such as race, gender and religious background, Bray said. “The desire to put a thumb on the scale was never consistent with that.”
While the agency has yet to file a lawsuit over a workplace DEI program under Lucas, DeGroff expects to see such “cases hit the docket” in 2026.
Valerie Wilson, director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said that priorities like dismantling DEI have “turned the mission of the EEOC on its head, in a way that weaponizes it against the people that it was intended to protect, given the long history of racial discrimination and exploitation” in the United States.
Lucas contends the EEOC is making up for past administrations that “went hunting for activist matters while closing its eyes to overt widespread discrimination occurring against groups it disfavored.” Earlier this year, it issued guidance encouraging workers to challenge DEI policies by their employers.
Among possible targets are 2o law firms from which the EEOC said it has requested information about their DEI and hiring practices going back nearly a decade.
Jason Solomon, director of the National Institute for Workers’ Rights, a think tank focusing on private workplace law, wonders whether there’s much more for the EEOC to target given that companies have largely gotten rid of identity-based programs.
“They may look at the changed landscape and say, ‘We can declare victory because we’ve gotten employers to change a lot of what they’ve done,’” Solomon said.
Backing away
Race discrimination complaints are historically among the most common lodged with the EEOC — 29,000 a year on average since 1997, according to a reportfrom EPI — but 2025 marked “the lowest number of race/national origin-based filings by the EEOC in at least a decade,” Seyfarth’s report states.
Two of the lawsuits it pursued alleged bias against U.S.-born workers in favor of foreign ones, DeGroff said. One case involved a hotel and resort in Guam, LeoPalace Guam Corp., which agreed to pay $1.4 million to resolve claims that it favored Japanese workers over those from other countries, including the U.S.
The EEOC also has dismissed cases filed on behalf of transgender workers and stopped processing new gender identity complaints to comply with Trump’s executive order that prohibits agencies from using federal funds to support gender-identity issues, The Post has reported. It also removed “X” as a gender marker option on its discrimination charge intake form, making it harder for workers whose gender identity does not match their sex at birth to file complaints.
Over the summer, the agency resumed processing some transgender discrimination cases, The Post has reported, although the complaints will be subject to a heightened level of review.
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