EEOC chair says Trump admin is ‘widening’ civil rights aperture

Posted by News Room 27 May 2026
EEOC chair says Trump admin is ‘widening’ civil rights aperture

While Trump administration detractors may feel the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is recreating the conditions they seek to eradicate, EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas told an Atlanta audience last week that the agency is doing the opposite.

“I push back. We don’t have a narrower mandate. We have a broader mandate,” Lucas said at Fortune Magazine’s Workplace Innovation Summit. 

She added, “I understand that people have pitched that the civil rights agenda of the Trump administration has narrowed the aperture, and I would say it’s widening it.”

“We are continuing to do discrimination work on behalf of workers of every single race and both sexes, but we’’re not going to only pick and choose historically underrepresented groups or only women,” she continued. “We’re going to say, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman, whether you’re Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, you pick it. We are going to be fighting for you based on the merit of your claim.’”

Lucas went on to laud her EEOC’s record recoveries, bringing up the $528 million the agency secured last year through pre-litigation mediation, conciliation and settlements. “If we had narrowed the aperture, how would we recover that?” she asked.

Lucas also addressed her social media call for potential EEOC bias claims from White men. Back in December, Lucas wrote on X, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact [EEOC] as soon as possible.”

In Atlanta, Lucas said, “Obviously, I did a viral video saying to White men, ‘You’re welcome to file with us,’ but that doesn’t mean you get special treatment. It means that you know that you are not going to get less equal treatment.”

Lucas noted that EEOC recovered approximately $15 million for White employees in the last fiscal year and that not a single dollar, last year or in the 10 years prior, remedied discrimination at work faced by White men. She highlighted EEOC v. The New York Times Co., filed earlier this month, alleging this was the first time in 10 years that EEOC brought a lawsuit on behalf of a White man. 

“No one is above the law — including ‘elite’ institutions,” Lucas said in a May 5 statement about EEOC’s New York Times lawsuit. “There is no such thing as ‘reverse discrimination,’” she added. “All race or sex discrimination is equally unlawful, according to long-established civil rights principles.”