The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) voted 2-1 along party lines on Tuesday to begin dismantling a 60-year-old demographic reporting system that requires employers to report workforce data by race, ethnicity, and sex. The proposal, published in the Federal Register two days later, argues that requiring employers to classify workers by race and sex may itself violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Comments are due by 24 August, with a hearing scheduled for 11 August.
What the proposal would change
Since 1966, private employers with at least 100 workers and federal contractors with at least 50 employees have filed annual EEO-1 reports, covering more than 50 million people at roughly 73,000 employers. The reports are confidential and identify no individual. The proposal would end mandatory collection of this data, though employers would still keep records of hiring, promotion, pay, and termination. The EEOC could still demand demographic information after a charge or lawsuit begins, but would no longer assume employers had collected it in the same standardized form.
The EEOC estimates that employers spend $273 million annually complying with the reporting requirement. The agency’s Republican majority framed the collection as a potential civil-rights injury, a stark reversal for a tool it has used for six decades to detect discrimination.
Selective enforcement concerns
Critics argue that eliminating routine reports gives EEOC leaders more control over when and which workplaces are examined for discrimination. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has previously invited white men who believed they had suffered race or sex discrimination to come forward and described diversity programs as producing widespread, systemic discrimination primarily against them.
Notably, Lucas initiated an investigation into Nike in May 2024 using a commissioner's charge, citing Nike's publicly disclosed EEO-1 data—the very reporting requirement she now proposes to eliminate. The investigation, which remains open, examines alleged bias against white employees. The latest public national count from 2023 shows that white men held 52.7% of executive and senior-management jobs, despite being about a third of the surveyed workforce, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Broader implications
The move parallels selective attention in other areas of government. ProPublica reported that State Department appointees sought to fund an Afrikaner group to study crimes against South African minorities, while the Trump administration reserved 10,000 refugee slots for Afrikaners. Through June, 7,727 of the 7,730 refugees admitted this fiscal year were South African, up from just one in the last full fiscal year before Trump took office.
Employers filed their 2024 numbers, but the commission has not published them; the 2025 collection may never open. A later administration could restore the form but could not recover the missing years. Without the nationwide record, the government is leaving workers alone with their wounds, according to Jamil Smith, a Guardian US columnist.
