Former EEOC officials say acting chair’s guidance on DEI a ‘grave disservice’ to employers

Posted by News Room 7 April 2025

Dive Brief:

  • Ten former U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission officials released a statement April 3 questioning guidance published last month by EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas under the title “What You Should Know About DEI-Related Discrimination at Work.”
  • The statement, which was addressed to the legal community, said the Lucas document “ignores important aspects of applicable law” and “does a grave disservice to employers, their employees, and America’s economy” in its characterization of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as “fraught with legal peril.”
  • The officials — all either former commissioners (nominated by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump), legal counsel or general counsel — said, “It is important for employers to have guidance on a positive forward-looking framework for lawful ways to increase diversity and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity in their workplaces.” The Lucas document, they wrote, “is inadequate to that task.”

Dive Insight:

The acting chair’s guidance was released March 19, along with a joint document by EEOC and the U.S. Department of Justice, outlining how employers’ DEI policies and programs can violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

“No matter an employer’s motive, there is no ‘good,’ or even acceptable, race or sex discrimination,” Lucas said at the time. “In the words of Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions, ‘two discriminatory wrongs cannot make a right.’”

Those documents were issued days after Lucas sent letters to 20 big law firms inquiring about their DEI practices. A similar group of former EEOC officials responded in kind in a letter to Lucas, claiming that her letters “imply a duty to respond without any basis in the laws that EEOC enforces.”

In the April 3 statement, the former EEOC officials explained how to lawfully run DEI training, organize employee resource groups, tap into unsourced talent pools and cast a wider recruitment net by removing degree requirements, among other methods of achieving greater workforce diversity.