On Tuesday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Republican majority voted 2–1 to begin dismantling a 60-year-old demographic reporting system. Two days later, the proposal entered the Federal Register, arguing that requiring employers to classify workers by race and sex may violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Comments are due on 24 August, with a hearing 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, but 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.
How the reporting system worked
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. A complaint identifies a wound. Data reveals the system that made it.
There are fair objections: employers spend $273 million a year complying, categories are broad and dated, and a numerical imbalance can be mistaken for proof of a problem. Yet the proposal suggests that compulsory collection of race and sex information may itself be unconstitutional, turning a tool used for six decades into a possible civil-rights injury.
Selective attention at the EEOC
Employers would still keep records of hiring, promotion, pay and termination, but the required demographic categories that let investigators compare decisions across groups would disappear. The commission could still demand demographic information after a charge or lawsuit, but it could no longer assume employers had collected the same information in the same form. The subpoena survives; the evidence thins.
EEOC chair Andrea Lucas has already shown 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.
The Nike investigation and national data
No employee complaint set the Nike 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 investigation remains open.
The latest public national count, from 2023, provides a check on Lucas’s claim of systemic discrimination. 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. Title VII protects white men too, but the 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.
Selective attention in foreign policy
The same selective attention governs the administration’s foreign policy. ProPublica reported 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 $1 million 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 while abandoning standardized evidence about the whole workforce. You cannot prove a pattern the government refuses to measure, but it can 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, but 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.
