This data has helped fight workplace discrimination for 60 years. The Trump administration plans to delete it

The US civil rights agency mandated to protect equal rights for workers is set to stop collecting data on the demographic makeup of companies – which for the past six decades has been used to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The move marks a fundamental shift for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Without this data, it will be much harder for the agency to identify widespread cases of discrimination in hiring and promotions, experts and former employees of the commission say. And, they warn, it will bring the Trump administration one step closer to reshaping the commission from an independent watchdog into an arm of the executive branch narrowly focused on advancing the political grievances of Donald Trump’s base.

Over the summer, the EEOC proposed terminating its EEO-1 reports, which require companies to submit information on employees, broken down by race, ethnicity, sex and job title. The proposal comes amid the Trump administration’s aggressive attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and its consistent work to terminate or alter decades’ worth of federal datasets because they conflict with its political goals. The majority-Republican commission is expected to approve the measure sometime in the fall.

“Getting rid of this data collection is part of a larger effort to weaponize civil rights enforcement and flip the laws that we have on their head,” said Katie Sandson, senior counsel on the education and workplace justice team at the National Women’s Law Center, which is suing the EEOC for refusing to enforce workplace protections for trans employees.

The EEO-1 is the only data collection of its kind, providing insights into trends such as the percentage of women in senior level executive positions in US companies and the racial makeup of a company’s lowest-paid staff. With this data, the EEOC, since its creation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has investigated thousands of employee complaints every year and helped recover billions of dollars for employees who faced discrimination and harassment.

But since Trump took office again in January 2025, the EEOC has completely rewritten its strategic goals, and is now prioritizing discrimination claims made by white men, dropping cases on behalf of transgender workers, investigating workplace diversity practices, and rescinding anti-harassment guidance.

At a July hearing, Andrea Lucas, the EEOC commissioner who was appointed by Trump, claimed the agency’s demographic data collection is unconstitutional, burdensome on employers, encourages DEI programs, and incentivizes discrimination against white workers.

“I believe the Commission’s proposed rescission of the annual reporting requirement will not hinder the Commission’s law enforcement work to investigate specific charges of discrimination,” Lucas said in a statement on the proposed end of the data collection. The EEOC did not respond to the Guardian’s specific questions about how the agency’s priorities have shifted under the second Trump administration.

‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’

The EEOC receives nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints every year. EEO-1 data is one of the first tools EEOC investigators use to determine what cases it should put its limited enforcement resources towards, a question that has become especially important at a time when the EEOC’s staffing levels are at its lowest point in 45 years.

“If you see a particular employer really stands out because they have fewer women in management or fewer Black people in management compared to their peer employers in the same industry or in the same area, it’s more likely the case that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there’s something going on here,” said Karla Gilbride, a former general counsel at the EEOC who is now a deputy director of litigation for the Disability Rights program at the ACLU.

The EEO-1 data is also made public in the aggregate (meaning individual employers cannot be identified). For researchers and civil rights advocates, it has been an important source of data to evaluate the impact of diversity and workforce policies.

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a founding director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that he and other researchers have had data-sharing agreements with the EEOC since the late 1990s. Last summer, the EEOC abruptly terminated all data-sharing agreements with social scientists and stopped all communication with them, said Tomaskovic-Devey.

In cases when the EEOC can’t settle a complaint with the employer, they can take the employer to court, and EEO-1 data can also be used as supporting evidence in litigation.

One such lawsuit started with a complaint filed by Cassandra Coleman. In 2016, she applied for a trucking job at the Phoenix, Arizona, office of Central Transport, a large national trucking company. A male employee tried to discourage her from applying. “It’s not going to do you any good,” he said, according to the complaint. Despite having 21 years of experience and a spotless driving record, Coleman never got a call back from the company. Central Transport hired 10 male truck drivers around the same time.

Three years later, Coleman applied for another job at Central Transport, this time in Portland, Oregon. She was invited for an interview, but when she arrived at the company offices, she was told the position had been filled.

The EEOC found that Coleman wasn’t alone. Female applicants at more than 25 locations across the country alleged their applications to work at Central Transport had been thrown away, lost, or passed over for less-qualified male candidates, and together, their cases became part of a class-action lawsuit filed by the EEOC.

In the lawsuit, the EEOC used the EEO-1 data to show there was a consistent statistical disparity between the number of female truck drivers hired and the number of female applicants, according to the complaint.

Combining the data findings with witness testimonies, the agency alleged that Central Transport repeatedly passed over qualified female applicants for more than 10 years and in multiple states. In May 2026, Central Transport agreed to pay $5.5m and enter a consent decree to make changes to its hiring process.

A broader attack on diversity, equity and inclusion

Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved quickly to make the rollback of DEI efforts an explicit government objective. Changes at the EEOC have been at the center of this transformation.

One of Trump’s first acts during his second term was to fire two of the three Democratic EEOC commissioners before the end of their five-year terms, an unprecedented move that laid the groundwork for Republicans to gain a 2-1 majority on the commission.

In addition to rescinding EEO-1 data collection, the EEOC has since rolled back guidelines protecting workers from national origin-based discrimination; deleted anti-harassment guidance because it included using the wrong pronouns as harassment, dropped all active cases pertaining to trans or nonbinary people; and announced its intent to revise the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to exclude people who need accommodations for abortions and other pregnancy-related medical conditions.

Other efforts to root out “DEI-related discrimination” have targeted specific employers. The EEOC opened investigations into Nike’s corporate diversity practices, sent letters to 20 law firms requesting information about their DEI practices and sued the New York Times for allegedly discriminating against a white male employee who did not get promoted.

In December, Lucas, the EEOC commissioner, encouraged white men to file discrimination complaints to the EEOC in a post on X. In a video she asks: “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.”

For now, many of the top-down changes appear to have had minimal impact on the types of cases the EEOC is continuing to tackle. “The bulk of EEOC investigator time is still devoted to the ordinary charges they get about ongoing discrimination,” said Chai Feldblum, who was a commissioner from 2010-2019 and is now the president of the EEO Leaders, a watchdog group of former EEOC employees tracking the Trump administration’s actions at the agency.

But Feldblum is worried that agency staff are increasingly being pressured to prioritize certain cases based on the agency’s new strategic goals. EEOC staffers told Mother Jones last year that they were told to prioritize complaints from workers who allege they were discriminated against for being American-born and stop pursuing gender-identity discrimination cases.

In June, the EEOC withdrew its 10-year strategic enforcement plan and instituted a new national enforcement plan, which explicitly lays out a narrow set of new priorities for the agency: combating “DEI-related discrimination” and “anti-American national origin discrimination”, and protecting “workers’ rights to express the binary nature of sex” and “religious liberty rights”.

Getting rid of EEO-1 data is one way to carry out this plan.

“The data is not going to show that white people or men are disproportionately not represented in management positions, and so they have no interest in collecting that,” Feldblum said.

“It’s not a coincidence that the EEOC is trying to eliminate data collection that documents potential discrimination,” said Maya Raghu, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s director of the Protecting and Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative.

“It’s all part of a bigger pattern of this administration weaponizing our civil rights agencies, both to undermine civil rights protections and enforcement, but also to advance this anti-diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.”

The Guardian’s Deleted data series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or recreate lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out at [email protected].