Since 1966, companies with 100 or more employees have been required by federal law to file an annual report with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disclosing the demographic breakdown of their workforce — how many people they employ by race, sex, ethnicity, and job level. About 73,000 employers file the report each year, covering approximately 56 million workers. The data has been the primary tool the federal government uses to identify patterns of hiring discrimination, pay disparities, and underrepresentation of women and people of color in management roles — patterns that often cannot be seen at the level of individual complaints but show up clearly when you look at what a company’s entire workforce looks like. Over 60 years, the data generated by these reports has led to investigations and settlements worth billions of dollars. On May 14, 2026, the EEOC submitted a formal proposal to the Office of Management and Budget to eliminate the reporting requirement entirely. Federal agencies were already instructed in June to stop reporting their own demographic data. If the proposal moves forward, the government will no longer collect the data that makes systemic enforcement of workplace discrimination law possible.
What the Report Is and What It Covers
The report is called the EEO-1 Component 1. It is a form filed annually with the EEOC — the federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically to enforce federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination. The form requires covered employers to report the number of employees at each of their locations, broken down by ten job categories ranging from executives and senior managers to laborers and service workers, and across seven racial and ethnic categories plus sex. The threshold for filing is 100 employees for private sector companies and 50 employees for federal contractors. The form has been required since 1966, two years after the Civil Rights Act that created the EEOC was signed into law. It covers not just hiring but the entire structure of who works where within a company — so if a company hires people of color into entry-level roles but promotes white employees into management at significantly higher rates, that pattern appears in the data. Related forms cover the same information for unions (EEO-3), state and local government employers (EEO-4), and public elementary and secondary school systems (EEO-5). The EEOC’s proposal would eliminate all of them.
How the Data Has Been Used
The data serves two distinct functions. The first is complaint-driven: when an individual files a discrimination charge with the EEOC, investigators use the employer’s EEO-1 data as context. A complaint about being passed over for promotion carries more weight if the employer’s own workforce data shows that employees who look like the complainant are systematically absent from higher job tiers. The second function is proactive: the EEOC uses aggregate EEO-1 data to identify industries, regions, or individual employers where demographic patterns raise red flags before any complaint is filed. This is what allows the agency to initiate investigations or outreach programs based on what the data shows rather than waiting for individual workers to come forward. That matters because individual discrimination is often invisible at the individual level. A single hiring decision can always be explained away. A pattern across 73,000 reports cannot. The EEOC makes aggregated EEO-1 data publicly available, which also allows researchers, journalists, and civil rights organizations to identify trends independently of what the agency chooses to prioritize. Over the six decades the requirement has been in place, enforcement actions built on or informed by EEO-1 data have produced billions of dollars in settlements. Among the major employers that have faced discrimination findings informed in part by workforce demographic data: large financial institutions, national retailers, technology companies, and federal contractors.
What the EEOC Is Proposing
On May 14, 2026, the EEOC formally submitted a proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget to rescind the EEO-1 reporting requirement, along with the EEO-3, EEO-4, and EEO-5 forms. The proposal is framed as a deregulatory action consistent with the administration’s executive orders directing agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and reduce regulatory burden on employers. The EEOC under the Trump administration has stated that the data collection is no longer aligned with the agency’s enforcement priorities. The proposal does not claim the requirement is unlawful — it is an exercise of the agency’s discretion to end a reporting program it has operated for 60 years. Under federal rulemaking procedures, the proposal must be reviewed by OMB before it is published as a formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register. After publication, there is a public comment period, typically 60 days, during which the agency must receive and respond to public input before issuing a final rule. The requirement remains in effect during this process. The EEOC has signaled that the next scheduled filing cycle, covering 2025 workforce data, may be the last one.
What Has Already Happened: Federal Agencies Stop Reporting
The federal government did not wait for the rulemaking process to complete before beginning to dismantle the data infrastructure. On June 3, 2026, the EEOC issued instructions to federal agencies telling them they were no longer required to report the demographic breakdown of their own workforces by race, sex, or ethnicity. Agencies were also told they no longer needed to address diversity and inclusion principles or gender identity categories in their annual workforce reports. The instruction applied immediately. The federal government employs approximately 2.3 million civilian workers. Those workers’ demographic data, which had previously been reported to the EEOC and made available to Congress and the public, is no longer being collected. The change at federal agencies does not require a rulemaking process because the EEOC has direct authority over how federal agencies report to it. The elimination of private-sector reporting requires the formal rulemaking process described above. The federal workforce change is a preview of what the private-sector elimination would produce at a much larger scale: a federal government that no longer knows, or is required to disclose, what its workforce looks like.
What Disappears Without It
If the EEO-1 requirement is eliminated, no other publicly available data source will allow the federal government to assess the demographic makeup of private employers’ workforces. Individual discrimination complaints can still be filed and investigated, but the aggregate data context that makes pattern identification possible is gone. The EEOC loses its ability to initiate investigations based on what the data reveals about industries or employers before individual workers come forward. Pay equity analysis at the federal level becomes essentially impossible without the underlying employment data. Researchers and civil rights organizations lose public access to the aggregate workforce data the reports currently generate. Some states have moved to fill the gap independently. California and Illinois have enacted their own pay data reporting requirements that will remain in effect regardless of what the federal government does. But for the majority of the country, and for national employers operating across state lines, the elimination of the federal requirement means the data simply will not exist. The EEOC has made clear this is a deliberate policy choice, not a technical change. Last year the agency stopped using the disparate impact legal standard, which is the method courts and investigators have traditionally used to demonstrate discrimination through statistical evidence of workforce outcomes rather than proof of discriminatory intent. That change removed the primary legal tool for using demographic data in enforcement. This proposal removes the data itself. The two changes together leave employment discrimination law formally intact while stripping the mechanisms that made enforcement of it possible.