The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is considering ending its collection of corporations’ data on the racial and gender makeup of their employees, potentially undercutting a key federal tool to track employment discrimination.
The move also raises questions as to what data the administration expects to use to carry out its effort to prove anti-white discrimination is a systemic problem worthy of intervention.
According to the Washington Post:
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is considering no longer collecting demographic information including race, sex and national origin from major American companies, departing from a practice that began during the civil rights era of the 1960s and was critical to the agency’s efforts to root out workplace discrimination. The EEOC also wants to ax data reporting rules for apprenticeship programs, unions, state and local governments, and schools, as well as reporting requirements in other civil rights laws that protect workers, including those who are pregnant or have disabilities.
The Post’s report notes that race and gender employment data came under fire in Project 2025, the far-right playbook Trump’s administration has been following to enact its agenda:
“Crudely categorizing employees by race or ethnicity fails to recognize the diversity of the American workforce and forces individuals into categories that do not fully reflect their racial and ethnic heritage,” wrote Project 2025 author Jonathan Berry, who is now solicitor for the Department of Labor.
The Trump administration’s gutting of federal agencies, its mass purges of employees that decimated diversity in the government and its assault on diversity in corporate America have pushed many people from marginalized groups, particularly Black women, out of the workforce.
Civil rights activist Noreen Farrell, whose work focuses on fair pay and workplace discrimination, told me last year that Trump’s changes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and his push to end the agency’s jobs report risked making that problem worse.
“First they dismantled workplace protections. Then they gutted DEI programs. Now, as women abandon careers in record numbers, they want to stop counting,” Farrell said, adding, “This is what systematic discrimination looks like in 2025.”
So continues the Trump administration’s war on reputable government data. If the government can obscure or abandon data about who is working where, it will open the door to potential discrimination and hinder efforts to combat it.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.