The EEOC exists to fight discrimination. Fired official fears a hobbling under Trump

When Jocelyn Samuels learned through an email late on the evening of Jan. 27 that she was being removed from her seat on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she was shocked.

She had heard rumblings that President Trump might try to oust commissioners of independent agencies, but she didn’t think it would happen to her.

After all, the veteran civil rights lawyer had worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations. What’s more, she had been Trump’s pick to fill a Democratic seat on the bipartisan commission during his first term.

“I did not hide my policy views or the way I go about legal interpretation when I was interviewed by the Trump White House back in 2020,” says Samuels. “I believe I exercised my responsibilities with integrity and competence and a real attention to the rule of law.”

Yet now, five years on, she’s been told that her “radical” views, including her position that diversity, equity and inclusion work is permissible under law, make her unfit to serve.

The about-face has led Samuels to one conclusion.

“I think it is the perspectives of this administration that have changed and become significantly more radical,” she says.

Since returning to the White House three weeks ago, Trump has taken so many legally questionable actions to implement his agenda that Samuels’ removal, along with that of former EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows, has not sparked the widespread public response that it might have in quieter times.

But people who work in civil rights warn the firings are part of a broad attempt to dismantle the infrastructure for addressing systemic inequalities in America.

An agency established to fight discrimination

The EEOC was created by Congress 60 years ago to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With headquarters in Washington, D.C., and field offices all over the country, its mission is to eliminate unlawful discrimination in the workplace.

Every year, the EEOC investigates tens of thousands of discrimination complaints, facilitating mediation in some cases and taking employers to court in others.

“The EEOC as an institution plays a critical role in advancing and vindicating the rights of those who have been subject to discrimination — a role that individuals simply can’t make up by hiring their own lawyers and filing their own lawsuits,” says Samuels.

Historically, the agency has prioritized protecting vulnerable workers and people from underserved communities.

Samuels fears that focus will end, as Trump takes his crackdown on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) into all corners of the federal government and beyond.

Already, the Trump administration has halted DEIA-related work throughout the government, revoked a 1965 executive order aimed at preventing employment discrimination by federal contractors and ordered government websites scrubbed of “gender ideology” content, among other things. Federal employees have been told to strip pronouns from their email signatures.

Acting EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, whom Trump also appointed to the commission in 2020, has already ended the use of the non-binary “X” gender option on forms used for filing discrimination claims.

And much bigger changes are ahead.

“Elections have consequences”

“I do think elections have consequences, and new administrations do have different priorities,” says Samuels. “I think what is going on now is an effort to eviscerate the underpinnings of EEOC policy… and the nature of the work that it is able to undertake in a way that is completely unprecedented.”

Currently, the EEOC cannot make any big policy changes. With only two commissioners remaining, it lacks a quorum.

But with vacant seats that Trump can fill, the commission is expected to soon gain a Republican majority. At that point, Samuels expects an upheaval.

Lucas has vowed to rescind portions of the EEOC’s harassment guidance that make clear that trans people are protected from harassment on the basis of gender identity.

Samuels views that guidance as a vital tool for protecting people who have experienced egregious treatment at work, “whether it’s through misgendering, or asking invasive questions about employees’ genitalia, or saying that people are not real men if they are trans men, or calling people ‘it.'”

Lucas, meanwhile, contends that the guidance puts women in danger by ignoring “biological realities.”

“The same agency that in the 1960s and 70s fought to ensure women had the right to their own restrooms, locker rooms, sleeping quarters, and other sex-specific workplace facilities — and established that it would be sex discrimination not to provide such women-only facilities — betrayed women by attacking their sex-based rights in the workplace,” Lucas said in a statement last month. “That must end.”

A decision to rescind the gender identity part of the guidance could put the commission at odds with the Supreme Court. In 2020, the court ruled, “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

A chilling effect on employers

Many also worry that the Trump EEOC will adopt a proposal from Project 2025 to end the requirement that employers with 100 or more employees provide the government with yearly data about the race, ethnicity, gender and job category of their workers. Without the data, the EEOC may not be able to prove that an employer’s hiring or promotion practices are discriminatory.

“I am deeply worried that the EEOC will no longer be an agency that is committed to protecting and vindicating the rights of vulnerable workers, and will instead be a barrier to their ability to be protected from discrimination,” says Samuels.

Even before any big policy changes are finalized, Samuels anticipates many employers will cease all kinds of efforts to address barriers to opportunity, even things like mentorship programs that are open to all.

“Because the administration has offered no description of the kinds of initiatives that it is sweeping into the DEI rubric, employers may be chilled,” she says.

She fears that Trump’s executive orders, which include many references to “illegal DEI and DEIA policies” and a direct call to private sector employers to examine their own practices, may lead some companies to inadvertently violate anti-discrimination laws.

As an example, federal law requires that employers make accommodations for employees and job applicants with disabilities, unless those accommodations would impose an undue hardship.

“Clumping accessibility together with this Trump DEI, as if these are woke, ideological terms that have no relationship to legal requirements, I think just leads employers down the garden path to believe that complying with their accommodation obligations is discretionary,” she says.

A fight of her own

After a career fighting on behalf of other people, Samuels is now weighing whether to challenge her own firing in court.

“I’m going to be thinking very hard about appropriate next steps,” she says.

Ninety years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents don’t have the power to fire commissioners of independent agencies.

Through multiple firings, Trump is setting up opportunities for courts to reconsider that decision.

Already, Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board who was fired by Trump the same night as Samuels, has sued Trump, citing language in the National Labor Relations Act that allows the president to remove board members only for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.

“We trust that the courts will uphold the law’s longstanding protections for agency independence,” Wilcox’s attorney Deepak Gupta said in a statement.