Companies won’t get away with sweeping past discrimination against employees under the rug, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) acting Chair Andrea Lucas told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
Lucas sat down with the DCNF to discuss ongoing efforts to defend religious liberty, push back against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and protect women’s spaces in the workplace.
“A lot of companies want to just sort of memory hole what happened from 2020 to 2024,” Lucas told the DCNF.
“You don’t get to do that,” she said. “There’s a cost to your bad behavior. And we’re going to exact that cost, one way or the other, because we’re going to remedy victims who were harmed.”
Changes At Trump’s EEOC
Lucas began as a commissioner towards the end of the first Trump administration in 2020 and remained on the commission through the Biden administration. In her time at the agency, Lucas has seen a “lot of swings back and forth” — though the biggest changes have been since “taking back the White House.”
“That’s in part because the agency is an executive branch agency, which is the subject of debate right now,” she said. “My colleagues [who got fired] are claiming that it isn’t, but it absolutely is.”
President Donald Trump removed two Democratic commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows, from their positions in January. Samuels’ ongoing lawsuit to reclaim her position, which she filed in April, alleges Trump’s decision undermines the agency’s “historic independence.”
Trump appointed Lucas as acting chair in January, and the Senate confirmed her to a second term on the commission in July in a 52–45 vote. For Lucas, rightly applying civil rights laws means starting with “first principles.”
“It’s about figuring out what the actual founding statutes are and also thinking about the big picture themes of our country, which is that every single human being is created equal, inherently imbued with dignity by God,” she said. “That’s the only reason why you are going to have the concepts of equal protection, concepts of equal opportunity. Not this Marxist theory of identity politics, which is just driven by power struggles, and who’s a victim, who’s an oppressor.”
Taking Back Institutions
“Laying siege to the institutions and taking them back is the big picture theme,” Lucas told the DCNF.
Settlements the agency secured in April with four major law firms, which required them to end DEI practices and race-based discrimination, are a key example of how the administration is pushing back.
“When you have the law firms change course, you’re going to also have a ripple effect for a lot more things,” she said, noting these big firms advise fortune 500 companies on their DEI practices.
Companies from Citigroup to Disney have announced decisions to walk back DEI policies since Trump’s election.
Pushing back on identity politics means targeting the “cultural movers,” she told the DCNF.
“The elite institutions that drove things… like elite universities, the elite law firms, the elite consulting companies,” she said. “When you focus on them, you’re going to change the culture more broadly.”
Inaction Under Biden Admin
Lucas highlighted several instances where the Biden administration remained silent when it could have taken action to protect workers.
Thousands of discrimination charges were filed over COVID-19 vaccine mandates, but few lawsuits were launched. Under Lucas’ leadership the agency has already sued several institutions for failing to offer religious accommodations. Lucas filed a commissioner’s charge targeting antisemitism at Columbia University, but it never moved forward.(RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Biden Admin Looked Other Way As Antisemitism Allegations Piled Up At Columbia, Trump Official Says)
The EEOC didn’t go “crazy woke” on DEI under Biden because “the law is actually quite conservative in this space,” Lucas said.
“My colleagues didn’t really like that, but they also weren’t willing to completely ignore the state of the law,” she said. “So all they can really do is just stay quiet or sort of foment the confusion and not clean it up.”
While companies started waking up after the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions, Lucas noted there was never a “DEI exception” in employment law.
‘No Authority’
In 2024, the Democrat majority commission published guidance that categorized using the wrong pronouns or maintaining sex-separate bathrooms, locker rooms and other private facilities as harassment.
Though many focused on the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX to include gender identity, Lucas said her agency’s guidance was “a little more explosive than people even realize” because it impacted almost every private workplace.
“And they did it with no authority,” she said. A federal court struck down portions of the guidance on sexual orientation and gender identity in May.
“We’ve indicated that it’s been vacated on our website,” she said. “We’ve grayed out the parts that have been vacated, but we can’t completely pull it down or change it until we have a quorum and a majority vote.”
The EEOC also pulled out of seven lawsuits involving gender identity, Lucas said.
“We’re very interested in defending women’s rights in the workplace,” she told the DCNF. “So wherever someone is seeing harm there, I hope they’ll raise their hand and know they’ll be taken seriously.”
Protecting American Workers
Lucas told the DCNF she intends to use Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination based on national origin to push back on illegal immigration.
Title VII is the section of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits employment discrimination.
“Certainly if someone has a background from another country, the law prohibits employers from preferring other people instead of that worker, but it goes both directions,” she said. “So if a company is importing illegal aliens or migrant workers or visa holders, and preferring them for whatever reason, bias cost, it doesn’t matter, at the expense of American workers, that’s national origin.”
Lucas noted it “ties in with the president’s immigration agenda.”
“It also is just the right thing to protect American workers,” she said. “They should have equal rights to anybody in their country. This is their country.”
