Civil rights groups warn ending EEOC workforce data could hide discrimination against Black workers

Civil rights groups and researchers are sounding the alarm over a Trump administration plan that would end a workplace reporting requirement in place for six decades. Their warning is simple. Without the data, discrimination against Black workers becomes much harder to see, track, and prove.

The requirement in question is the annual EEO-1 report. Since 1966, private employers with at least 100 workers, along with certain federal contractors with at least 50 employees, have had to submit reports to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showing the race and sex makeup of their workforce across job categories. The Republican-led commission voted 2 to 1 in July to propose ending it.

At a commission hearing on Tuesday, August 11, 22 speakers testified about the proposal. Most opposed it. Only six spoke in support. The measure is now open for public comment through August 24 and is not yet final.

Advocates argue the data has been one of the clearest windows into whether Black workers, women, and other groups are actually getting hired and promoted. Amalea Smirniotopoulos of the Legal Defense Fund warned that stripping the commission of its enforcement tools would land hardest on Black workers and other workers of color, who continue to report discrimination on the job.

Researchers made a parallel case about visibility. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey of the University of Massachusetts Amherst said he has drawn on the data across dozens of studies and warned that ending it would leave the country far more blind to workplace inequality than it is now.

Supporters of scrapping the requirement say collecting race and sex data is burdensome, unnecessary for enforcing anti-discrimination law, and might even push employers toward making decisions based on the very characteristics the law protects. Notably, representatives from two employer groups pushed back on that framing, telling the commission they had seen little sign that companies use the reports to set racial quotas. They said businesses often use the same numbers to catch hiring and promotion patterns that quietly shut certain groups out.

The fight lands in the middle of a broader rollback of federal diversity and inclusion policy. If the proposal is finalized, employers could still gather demographic data for their own compliance work, but the federal government would no longer require the submissions. For communities that have long used this data to hold employers accountable, that shift would mean losing a tool built over 60 years.