2025 in review: EEOC and DOJ shift course on DEI

We’ve reached the end of 2025, a year that felt both too short and entirely too long. A lot has happened to DEI along the way, due to Department of Justice (DOJ) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) changes as the Trump administration took power.

Changes at the EEOC. President Trump dismissed two Biden-era EEOC commissioners in January (a move that some legal scholars argued was unlawful). An EEOC quorum was restored in late October, when Brittany Panuccio was sworn in. Shortly after, Andrea Lucas, a staunch opponent of DEI, who Trump first nominated to the department in 2020, was named EEOC chair, the AP reported.

The EEOC now has the three members it needs to move forward with its priorities, which have shifted greatly since Trump returned to office.

In March, Lucas, then serving as the acting chair, demanded that the nation’s top law firms turn over the details of their DEI programs and issued vague guidance on what the administration considers unlawful DEI practices. Shortly thereafter, several law firms removed DEI language from their websites, HR Brew reported.

Former EEOC commissioners expressed concern over Lucas’ leadership. “No single member of the Commission, including the Chair, has the authority to unilaterally change the EEOC’s longstanding position on employers’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts,” commissioners said in a letter.

The agency also stopped pursuing discrimination lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers and investigating disparate impact claims, following directives from President Trump, HR Brew reported. Instead, it focused on reducing, what it calls, “anti-American bias” in the workplace and promoting more religious accommodations, like allowing employees to display religious symbols.

“People can still, as of now, bring disparate impact claims. So the EEOC not doing it doesn’t mean that private litigants are unable to bring those claims,” David Glasgow, co-founder of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law, told HR Brew, adding that abandoning disparate impact cases is still significant. Blatant discrimination is more rare these days, according to Glasgow, but, “far more common is just that processes that are used for hiring or promotion or evaluation or whatever it might be, are in some way systemically biased against particular groups, and that’s only going to be amplified in the age of AI.”

Looking forward, Glasgow noted that HR leaders should keep an eye on potential changes to harassment guidance related to transgender workers, as well as regulations surrounding the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

“The regulations under the prior administration were extended to include other aspects that were not narrowly pregnancy related, having to do with things like menstruation and menopause,” Glasgow said. “She [Lucas] doesn’t like that and thinks that is too broad. So I’m looking out to see if there’s any movement on that topic.”

The Department of Justice steps in. The DOJ has attempted to use the False Claims Act (FCA) and the newly created Civil Rights Fraud initiative to enforce its anti-DEI measures, according to Bloomberg Law. The department has also encouraged government contractors workers to report employers that may be practicing so-called “illegal DEI,” with promises of up to 30% of damages recovered by the government.

In September, government contractors started receiving demand letters, requesting that they respond with information on their DEI initiatives for the first stage of an investigation, according to the Federal News Network.

“It’s a tenuous theory that’s going to be tested in the courts, which will ultimately be the adjudicators of whether it’s viable or not,” Teddie Arnold, a government contracts partner at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, told Bloomberg Law, adding that it’s unclear whether the FCA is an appropriate avenue for prosecuting companies that violate anti-discrimination laws. Using the FCA to prosecute employers for violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a “departure” from tradition, according to Reuters.

FCA cases are partly dependent on whether a defendant understands the compliance rules and defies them anyway. However, some legal analysts point out that the Trump administration still has not clearly defined what constitutes “illegal DEI policies,” and employers may not understand how to comply until the federal government issues more guidance.

“I’m definitely going to be interested to see what emerges from that,” Glasgow said. “If they [the DOJ] get material or don’t get material that they don’t like, and then they decide to sue. Obviously, that’s going to be a huge development if they start bringing False Claims Act litigation based on DEI.”

HR Brew will continue to keep you in the loop about DEI changes in 2026. Stay tuned!