Dive Brief:
- EEO Leaders, a group of former U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Labor officials, questioned EEOC’s proposed rescission of anti-harassment guidance in a letter released Tuesday.
- The group said EEOC’s Dec. 29 request to the White House for approval to rescind the Biden-era guidance “is yet another salvo in this Administration’s prolonged attack on LGBTQI+ people.” EEOC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- Shortly after being named acting chair of EEOC, Andrea Lucas, now the agency’s chair, made a pledge to “[roll] back the Biden administration’s gender identity agenda” and called for the rescission of the guidance to “protect the sex-based privacy and safety needs of women.”
Dive Insight:
Lucas voted against the 2024 anti-harassment guidance, namely opposing its position that denying a person access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with their gender identity and repeatedly or intentionally using pronouns that don’t align with someone’s gender identity represent harassing conduct.
“The Commission’s harassment guidance was fundamentally flawed,” Lucas said in a January 2025 statement. “It ignored biological reality, effectively eliminated single-sex workplace facilities, and impinged on all employees’ rights to freedom of speech and belief … The EEOC must rescind the guidance and protect the sex-based privacy and safety needs of women.”
EEO Leaders said the rescission attempt is part of the Trump administration’s “broader effort to weaken enforcement of federal employment anti-discrimination laws and, simultaneously, to diminish public understanding that federal law firmly prohibits harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The group also criticized the agency’s decision to request approval for rescission without giving the public opportunity to comment, as it was able to do for the proposed guidance.
“The Commission sent its request to the White House as a ‘final rule,’ rather than as a proposal, thereby asserting that the EEOC has authority to hastily rescind this guidance without notice and comment, despite the fact that the original guidance was issued by the Commission after extensive notice and comment,” the group said.
The former officials noted that not allowing public comment “conflicts” with a position the Trump Justice Department and the EEOC Chair took in a February 2025 court filing that characterized the anti-harassment guidance as “significant guidance” and that “[t]o rescind or revise portions of the [Harassment] Guidance, the Commission will have to follow the notice and comment procedures for significant guidance documents.”
