The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has voted to end a 60-year-old requirement for employers to submit demographic data on their workforces. This move halts a practice that has been in place for six decades and has drawn criticism from civil rights organizations.
Civil rights groups argue that discontinuing this data collection will hinder efforts to identify and address discrimination. Deborah Vagins, senior vice president at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, stated that the EEOC is acting as a "mouthpiece for Trump’s attacks on having a workforce reflective of America." She emphasized that the inability to measure problems, such as discrimination, prevents them from being addressed, and that ceasing assessment makes discrimination harder to prove.
The National Women’s Law Center also criticized the decision, labeling it the EEOC’s "latest attack on civil rights." The organization suggested that eliminating the data collection requirement could lead to enforcement priorities being based on politics rather than factual evidence.
Concerns about the future of this data collection were raised earlier this year when the EEOC did not announce the opening of the 2026 demographic data collection cycle in May. Around the same time, the Commission submitted a draft proposal to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to rescind the EEO-1 requirement, which mandates this data submission.