Workplace discrimination isolates. When a Black manager is passed over for a promotion, or a pregnant worker is quietly sidelined, they are left with a polite excuse and a lingering suspicion. They cannot see the company-wide spreadsheet. They cannot know if others are hitting the same invisible wall. For 60 years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has kept a spreadsheet of its own: an annual demographic snapshot compiled from employer reports. That nationwide record lets the agency see beyond any one complaint.
Last Tuesday, however, the EEOC’s Republican majority voted 2–1 to begin dismantling that reporting system. Two days later, the proposal entered the Federal Register, arguing that requiring employers to classify workers by race and sex may itself violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The rule is not final: comments are due on 24 August, and a hearing is set for 11 August.
In plain English: the federal government wants to stop keeping the count it created to tell whether employers obey the law.
The Civil Rights Act will remain on the books, helping this change slip past notice – and perhaps outlast those behind it. An administration does not have to repeal a civil right if it can blind the agency charged with enforcing it. You cannot prove a pattern the government has chosen not to see. Yet blindness is not quite the plan. The EEOC would stop looking routinely across the workforce while keeping the power to examine particular employers when its leaders choose. That is not colorblindness. It is selective attention.
Since 1966, private employers with at least 100 workers, and certain federal contractors with at least 50, have reported employees by race or ethnicity, sex and 10 job categories. Today, those reports typically cover more than 50 million people at roughly 73,000 employers. A company’s submission is confidential; the public dataset identifies no one. It sounds like paperwork until you consider that it shows the agency what no single worker can see. A complaint identifies a wound. Data reveals the system that made it.
There are fair objections to these reports. They require employers to sort workers into demographic categories even when no one has alleged discrimination. The categories are broad and sometimes dated. A numerical imbalance can be mistaken for proof of a problem, or used to defend preferences the law forbids. The EEOC estimates employers spend $273m a year complying. All of that is worth taking seriously. It sounds like a case for updating the form and enforcing the law carefully, not abandoning the system itself. Yet the proposal suggests that compulsory collection of this race and sex information may itself be unconstitutional. For an agency built to find discrimination, that is a remarkable turn: a tool it has used for six decades is now framed as a possible civil-rights injury.
Employers would still keep records of hiring, promotion, pay and termination. The required demographic categories that let investigators compare those decisions across groups would disappear. The commission could still demand demographic information after a charge or lawsuit begins, but it could no longer assume employers had collected the same information in the same form. The subpoena survives; the evidence thins.
Routine reports arrived whether or not the agency suspected anyone. Without them, its leaders would gain more control over when – and whose workplaces – the government examines for discrimination. This isn’t an agency going blind. It is choosing what it wants to see.
The EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas, has already shown us whose allegations she finds urgent. In December, she invited white men who believed they had suffered race or sex discrimination to come to the EEOC. She has described diversity programs as producing widespread, systemic discrimination, primarily against them.
Look no further than Nike. No employee complaint set that investigation in motion; Lucas did, through a commissioner’s charge in May 2024. The charge itself cites Nike’s publicly disclosed EEO-1 data – a product of the very reporting requirement she now proposes to eliminate. The agency later subpoenaed extensive records, including demographic data, while investigating alleged bias against white employees. The investigation remains open. The need for a charge is no real limit when a commissioner can issue one herself.
The latest public national count, from 2023, offers a useful check on Lucas’s claim of systemic discrimination in the US. White men were about a third of the surveyed workforce, yet held 52.7% of executive and senior-management jobs – the only group in the Associated Press’s analysis overrepresented at that level.
That does not mean white men cannot be wronged at work. Title VII protects them, and the EEOC should enforce the law for them. But that is one thing a nationwide record is good for: letting evidence test an official’s theory. Lucas wants to end the measurement best able to complicate a conclusion she has already reached.
The same selective attention governs the administration’s foreign policy. ProPublica reported this month that appointees in the state department’s human rights bureau sought to fund an Afrikaner group, Lex Libertas, to study crimes against South African minorities. The idea later became an invitation-only competition for a $1m grant, still undecided. By then, Trump had reserved 10,000 additional 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.
Some Afrikaners may have legitimate claims, as some white men face workplace discrimination. But the double standard is hard to miss: the government treats one collective grievance as settled and may spend public money documenting it while abandoning standardized evidence about the whole workforce. You cannot prove a pattern the government refuses to measure. The government can, however, commission the search for a pattern it has already chosen to believe.
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; it could not go back and take the picture. The years without a count will remain years without a count. Title VII will still forbid discrimination at work. But without that nationwide record to reveal the system, the government is leaving workers alone with their wounds.
- Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist