June 11, 2026
In the coming months, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s chief will wield her newly centralized powers to continue zeroing in on employers’ diversity, equity and inclusion practices and investigating antisemitism allegations on college campuses, attorneys said.
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Demise of Reporting Regime
Beyond these enforcement hot spots, the agency is poised to eliminate its decades-old requirements mandating that large employers report their workplace demographics. The EEOC sent a proposal to the White House on May 14 to halt the collection of EEO-1 reports, as well as other data surveys.
The agency’s EEO-1 reports require private employers with 100 or more employees, or federal contractors with over 50 workers, to submit workforce demographic data by job category and sex and race or ethnicity. Its EEO-3, EEO-4 and EEO-5 data collections call for similar information from unions, state and local governments and public schools.
The commission has said in the past that the information gathered is used for enforcement and research, as well as companies’ self-assessments. It’s also posted publicly in aggregate form, giving outside groups a sense of where problems persist.
The EEOC hasn’t formally given its rationale for the walk-back, but in a statement regarding the EEO-1data collection, Lucas indicated she had concerns that the demographic reports may prompt companies to discriminate in an attempt to correct for disparities surfaced by the data.
The proposal sent to the White House is still under review, but experts have told Law360 they expect it to eventually clear.
Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC partner Joseph M. Sellers, founder and co-chair of the worker-side firm’s civil rights and employment practice, told Law360 the plan represents another example of how the agency’s current leadership is radically departing from past practices.
The data from the EEO-1s and other surveys provides a crucial pathway to discern patterns of unlawful workplace conduct, he said.
“It’s going to deprive the commission of a critical enforcement tool,” Sellers said. “Relying almost exclusively on charges is an enormous setback to the capacity of the commission.”