EEOC Issues New Enforcement Plan for Fiscal Years 2025-2029
On June 4, 2026, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a revised National Enforcement Plan (NEP). The NEP sets forth the agency’s enforcement agenda and supersedes (and starkly departs from) the 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan. (That departure comes as no surprise given that, in December 2025, the agency, through an X post by its Chair Andrea Lucas, announced a focus on pursuing claims brought by what was previously considered the “majority” versus “minority,” and called on white males who believed they had experienced discrimination to come forward.)
This NEP emphasizes that the EEOC mission is to protect workers of all races and genders, including white male employees and applicants. The agency further stated that it will prioritize claims of disparate treatment over disparate impact, stating that disparate treatment claims “inherently are more egregious than unintentional disparities between groups of employees which arise from an employer’s neutral policies or practices.”
As part of that goal, the NEP further lists these potential violations among its priorities:
- Discriminatory practices based on a protected characteristic, including hiring and companywide policies that have mass disparate treatment and/or systemic harassment;
- Intentional discrimination from broad policies, programs, or practices, including race or sex-based quotas calling out “aspirational goals” or otherwise incentivizing or prioritizing races or genders in making employment decisions such as hiring, training, termination, fringe benefits, etc.;
- Retaliation;
- Breaches of settlement agreements; and
- Protection of vulnerable workers (described as low wage earners, sexual assault survivors, and workers with developmental or intellectual disabilities).
The EEOC seeks to pursue litigation in cases where it can further recent Supreme Court precedent, including claims involving DEI programs, voluntary affirmative action, religious accommodations, and employers’ right to express the binary nature of sex, among others.
Finally, the EEOC chair set as her priorities:
- To remedy DEI-related race and sex discrimination;
- Protection from anti-American national origin discrimination;
- Defending women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work and right to express the binary nature of sex; and
- Protecting religious liberty rights to receive religious accommodations and be free from religious discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.
Reinforcing this position, on June 9, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a Memorandum Opinion in response to Chair Lucas’s request that the DOJ review the constitutionality of the disparate impact provisions of the federal anti-discrimination statute (Title VII), particularly as applied by the EEOC. In response to that request and following the same approach as the NEP, the DOJ determined that the disparate impact theory of discrimination is unconstitutional.
As always, employers should review their policies and practices to ensure that they are in full compliance with applicable anti-discrimination laws. It is also best practice to consider these clarified updated enforcement priorities when reviewing decisions and implementing policies.
