EEOC's New Enforcement Plan Signals Shift in Priorities

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has released a new National Enforcement Plan (NEP), replacing the agency's 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan and offering employers a clearer picture of how the commission intends to approach discrimination enforcement under Chair Andrea Lucas.

The plan, announced June 4, reflects a significant shift in emphasis from the Biden-era EEOC and aligns the agency more closely with the policy objectives of the Trump administration. While the EEOC continues to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws, the new framework signals a different set of priorities — and a different approach to civil rights enforcement.

"The NEP will restore evenhanded enforcement of employment civil rights laws for all Americans," Lucas said in a statement announcing the plan.

The NEP will guide the agency's enforcement, litigation, outreach, education, and technical assistance efforts. For employers, it provides an early roadmap of the types of cases and workplace practices most likely to draw EEOC scrutiny.

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Areas of Focus

Among the plan's most notable priorities is a renewed focus on what the agency describes as "overt" discrimination. The EEOC said it will prioritize cases involving job advertisements and recruiting practices that explicitly encourage or discourage applicants based on protected characteristics. Examples cited in the plan include postings seeking "diverse candidates" or practices that favor certain visa holders or PERM applicants in ways that could constitute national-origin discrimination.

The agency also signaled that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives will remain a major enforcement target. According to the plan, the EEOC will prioritize programs labeled as DEI — or what it calls “similar euphemisms” — that involve race- or sex-based quotas, aspirational goals that function as quotas, diverse-slate requirements, diverse hiring panels, demographic reporting practices, or executive compensation tied to diversity objectives. The focus reflects Lucas' longstanding view that Title VII prohibits employment decisions based on protected characteristics regardless of the employer's intent.

Another priority involves litigation testing the scope of several recent Supreme Court decisions. The EEOC said it intends to focus on claims involving Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and Groff v. DeJoy. Those cases address issues ranging from majority-plaintiff claims and the injury threshold for actionable employment claims to race-conscious decision-making and religious accommodations.

The commission also plans to focus on workplace rights involving LGBTQ-related issues. Specifically, the plan calls for clarifying the scope of the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that Title VII's prohibition on sex discrimination extends to sexual orientation and gender identity. According to the plan, the EEOC will examine questions involving single-sex spaces, employers' ability to provide such spaces, the "right to express the binary nature of sex,” and religious accommodation requests based on sincerely held beliefs.

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Prioritizing Intentional Discrimination

The plan further signals a significant shift in how the agency views discrimination theories.

While acknowledging that disparate-impact liability remains part of federal law, the EEOC states that intentional discrimination — or disparate treatment — is a "more egregious" form of discrimination. As a result, the commission said it will prioritize disparate-treatment theories, including pattern-or-practice claims, and seek to minimize reliance on disparate-impact theories in investigations and litigation whenever possible. 

That position marks a notable departure from previous EEOC enforcement strategies, which frequently relied on disparate-impact analyses to challenge neutral workplace policies that disproportionately affected protected groups.

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Aligning With Administration Priorities

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the plan is its explicit statement that the EEOC is an executive branch agency that will use its enforcement authority to advance the policy objectives and executive orders of the Trump administration.

That language underscores the extent to which the commission's priorities have shifted since Lucas assumed leadership. Rather than emphasizing systemic discrimination or broad disparate-impact theories, the new plan focuses on intentional discrimination, DEI-related practices, recent Supreme Court rulings, and legal questions surrounding sex, gender identity, and religious accommodations.

For employers, the practical takeaway is that compliance reviews may need to be recalibrated. Organizations may want to evaluate recruiting materials, DEI initiatives, hiring and promotion practices, accommodation procedures, and workplace policies through the lens of the agency's updated priorities.

The NEP does not change the underlying federal laws employers must follow. It does, however, provide the clearest indication yet of how the Lucas-led EEOC intends to focus agency resources and enforce those laws — and where employers are most likely to find themselves under scrutiny in the years ahead.