Trump Moves To Scrap The Annual Report That Lets The Government Notice When Companies Discriminate, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Workplace Bias Could Still Be Detected Without A Confession

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration moved this week to eliminate the EEO-1 report, the annual workforce survey that for six decades has allowed the federal government to notice when American companies hire, pay, and promote along racial and gender lines, resolving a long-standing concern that discrimination could still be detected by anyone who bothered to look at the numbers.

The Office of Management and Budget completed its review of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's proposal to rescind the report, clearing the way to retire a data collection that since 1966 had required larger employers to disclose the demographic breakdown of their workforce by job category. Officials described the paperwork as burdensome, noting that the burden fell hardest on firms whose numbers, once assembled, tended to raise questions.

"For too long, employers have been forced to write down exactly who they hire and how much they pay them, and then hand that information to the very agency responsible for investigating discrimination," said one official familiar with the rulemaking, speaking on condition of anonymity because the point was better left unstated. "We are simply restoring the presumption that if no one is keeping track, nothing is happening."

The EEO-1 has long served as the starting point for identifying patterns of bias that individual workers, lacking access to a company's full payroll, could never see on their own. Its removal, civil rights attorneys noted, does not make workplace discrimination any less illegal; it merely returns the country to a system in which such discrimination must be proven one plaintiff at a time, ideally by a plaintiff who does not know it is happening. Administration officials characterized this as a return to fairness.

Sources within the administration confirmed that the rescission pairs neatly with the earlier revocation of the 1965 executive order governing federal contractors and the elimination of "disparate impact" as a theory of civil rights enforcement, completing a tidy arrangement in which discriminatory outcomes remain technically forbidden, statistically invisible, and functionally unprovable. The three actions taken together were said to reflect the President's broader vision of a color-blind society, defined as one in which the government is blind to the color of everyone's paycheck.

At press time, the EEOC had reassured Americans that workplace discrimination was now lower than it had ever been, citing the zero reports it expected to receive.