The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Thursday adopted an enforcement plan that formalizes its commitment to President Donald Trump’s priorities.
The commission rescinded its 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan, finalized under former President Joe Biden in fall 2023, and voted to replace it with a 2025-2029 National Enforcement Plan.
The NEP outlines priorities that echo items the agency, under the direction of Chair Andrea Lucas, has repeatedly targeted over more than a year of enforcement:
- “Remedying [diversity, equity and inclusion]-related race and sex discrimination”
- “Protecting American workers from anti-American national origin discrimination”
- “Defending women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work and workers’ rights to express the binary nature of sex”
- “Protecting workers’ religious liberty rights to receive religious accommodations and be free from religious discrimination, harassment, and related retaliation.”
The plan also reaffirms EEOC’s alignment with the executive branch, noting it will “use its discretion in its deployment of its enforcement authority to advance the Administration’s policy objectives and comply with relevant Executive Orders.”
Specifically, the NEP said EEOC will comply with Trump’s April 2025 order directing the federal government to eliminate the pursuit of disparate-impact liability. Intentional discrimination is “inherently … more egregious,” the document stated.
The Biden-era plan touched on emerging issues, like discrimination resulting from artificial intelligence tools. It also specifically focused on certain groups, noting the “continued underrepresentation of women and workers of color in certain industries and sectors” were areas of particular concern, and included LGBTQ+ individuals under its umbrella of vulnerable workers.
Lucas has made waves with a focus on “even-handed” enforcement. In a recent appearance at Fortune Magazine’s Workplace Innovation Summit, she defended the agency’s approach as “widening” the aperture to include all people under EEOC’s civil rights agenda. Critics, including former officials at the agency, say EEOC has abdicated its responsibility to prevent discrimination and abandoned certain workers, like transgender individuals.
“By prioritizing intentional discrimination and underscoring that every worker must be treated as an individual under the law, this plan sharpens the agency’s focus on protecting equal opportunity for all Americans,” Lucas said in an agency press release. “It strategically directs enforcement resources toward the most serious and consequential unlawful employment practices to better safeguard workers’ civil rights nationwide.”
Kalpana Kotagal, the commission’s lone Democrat, said in a LinkedIn post that she voted against the change. “Under the guise of even-handed enforcement, this NEP seeks to redirect limited resources toward prosecuting the Administration’s grievances and protecting the Administration’s most favored groups, instead of protecting all workers,” she said.
Kotagal said the agency is understaffed, and the change in direction has wounded morale. “Regrettably, this NEP will likely exacerbate morale issues, contributing to further attrition and making it difficult for the agency to fulfill its mission,” she said.
The NEP will remain in place until a majority of the commission votes to supersede, modify or withdraw it, EEOC said.