EEOC moves to end mandatory employer demographic reporting under Trump administration

Earlier this summer, the EEOC's Republican-controlled commission approved a rule to discontinue the mandatory EEO-1 reporting that has been collected since 1966. The change, driven by recommendations from the far-right Project 2025, would end the agency’s practice of gathering workforce demographic data from employers with 100 or more workers. While the public-comment window has closed, the agency could finalize the rule by month’s end.

Former commissioners argue the move creates a multi-year data gap that will weaken investigations into systemic bias, especially in disparate-impact cases that rely on aggregate statistics. Democratic commissioner Kalpana Kotagal and other experts say the shift will “kneecap” the EEOC’s enforcement capacity, though the Civil Rights Act still obliges employers to retain such records internally. Workers can still file charges, but investigations may become more limited without the agency’s data repository.