In 2026, EEOC solidifies its lockstep with Trump’s anti-DEI agenda
Over the past six months, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been closely aligned with President Donald Trump’s diversity, equity and inclusion outlook.
EEOC set the tone for 2026 when its chair, Andrea Lucas, solicited bias claims from White men via X in December 2025. Later on, Lucas revisited her online solicitation request, telling an audience of conference-goers that the agency was actually “widening” the aperture of civil rights law enforcement.
Spring was marked by EEOC announcing its plans to end EEO-1 reporting and different work-related demographic data collection processes. In early June, EEOC rescinded its previous 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan, solidified in President Joe Biden’s administration, and adopted a new enforcement plan in lockstep with Trump’s agenda. Priorities in the agenda include “remedying” DEI-related discrimination, protecting workers from “anti-American national origin discrimination,” and “defending women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work and workers’ rights to express the binary nature of sex.”
Most recently, EEOC rescinded guidelines related to affirmative action practices at work. The agency argued in a June 30 statement that the previous guidance “ran afoul” of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard.
The agency currently faces a lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, alleging improper conduct related to the Freedom of Information Act. Similarly, a coalition challenged a Trump-era anti-DEI contractor order in court, pushing back on the administration’s overall approach to the agenda that EEOC is enforcing.
How should HR professionals wrap their heads around all the changes regarding DEI? Amid the changes of Trump 2.0, attorneys suggested that HR professionals “lean on the law” by adhering to Title VII. Now is a time of reorientation, SHRM President and CEO Johnny Taylor Jr. told HR Dive at the annual conference.
