Right-Wing Fanatics Are Weaponizing America’s Anti-Discrimination Agency

Dylan Bringuel isn’t sure what’s worse: enduring what a federal agency identified as a “hostile work environment because of Bringuel’s transgender status” or that same agency abandoning them after committing to hold their employer accountable.

The first blow came in August 2022. Bringuel had just begun a housekeeping job at a Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown, New York. During the interview, Bringuel had been upfront about their gender identity and was told it wouldn’t be an issue. But from the start, their manager made it one—calling Bringuel “it” and a “Transformer” and, in a conversation a co-worker documented, blaming Bringuel for “what is wrong with society.” The day after reporting the harassment to supervisors, Bringuel was fired.

Bringuel was accustomed to such hostility, even from family members. So when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the hotel’s owner and operators on their behalf in September 2024, Bringuel was pleasantly surprised. “Somebody actually listened,” the now-29-year-old tells me through tears.

That feeling of being heard didn’t last long. In February, shortly after President Donald Trump took office, the EEOC asked a judge to dismiss the harassment case it had initiated. To Bringuel, it seemed like the government was giving employers permission to openly discriminate against trans workers. “It makes me feel that at any point, somebody can just do something that hurts me physically, not just mentally or emotionally,” Bringuel says.

Bringuel wasn’t alone. Citing Trump’s day-one executive order against “gender ideology extremism,” the EEOC submitted motions to dismiss all seven of its active cases pertaining to trans and nonbinary people. Dismissing the cases “is discriminatory and directly violates the agency’s core mission,” warns an EEOC employee who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation. “We’re here trying to help people who have been discriminated against and disadvantaged.”

The EEOC receives more than 80,000 complaints^[2] a year but only takes a few hundred to court—typically the most egregious claims, says Jocelyn Samuels, a longtime civil rights lawyer and EEOC commissioner who was fired by Trump^[3] in January. The agency’s motions under Trump to dismiss these developed cases not only harmed the 14 directly involved plaintiffs—people who the EEOC determined had been harassed about their genitalia, questioned about their sex lives, deadnamed, groped, or, like Bringuel, fired for reporting harassment—but it signaled to institutions nationwide that the administration condones such discrimination. Experts say the shift is part of a broader trend in which the civil rights–era agency and the anti-discrimination laws it enforces are being weaponized to advance the interests of Trump’s long-standing base. As Karen Ortiz, an EEOC administrative judge who was fired in June,^[4] puts it, his administration’s goal is to turn the agency into a “grievance apparatus for white, straight, Christian people.”

The racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s 2020 murder prompted institutions to make new commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Inflamed conservatives labeled the efforts as reverse racism and rushed to challenge them in court. In 2021, Stephen Miller, now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, helped found America First Legal to, as he boasted, lead “the charge against racism targeting white, straight men.” The organization’s tactics^[5] included sending—and publicizing—letters to the EEOC accusing corporations like Nordstrom, Tyson Foods, Anheuser-Busch, and Morgan Stanley of running DEI programs that purportedly discriminate against white people.

The conservative legal movement scored a big win in June 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled^[6] that Harvard University could no longer weigh race in admissions. While the case was ostensibly about ensuring Asian students were treated fairly, groups like Miller’s seized on the decision to go after DEI in the corporate sector. According to Michael Yelnosky, an employment law expert at Roger Williams University, their targets include efforts that are “lawful and that don’t raise the issues that concerned the court” in the Harvard case.

The EEOC’s new acting chair, Andrea Lucas, has made the right’s legal fight against DEI a full-blown government objective. Before she was first appointed as a commissioner at the agency intended to protect workers from harassment, Lucas worked as a litigator who helped successfully defend^[7] Ford Motor Company against a lawsuit that included allegations it overlooked acts of racial and sexual harassment, including attempted rape, exposed genitals, racial slurs, unwanted touching, and penis-shaped objects being left on female plaintiffs’ workstations.

On January 21, the day Trump promoted her to run the agency, Lucas vowed^[8] her priorities would include^[9] “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination.” Within weeks, I heard from staff that she had ordered a pause on investigating complaints from LGBTQ Americans.

In March, she sent^[10] public letters to 20 law firms, arguing that a photo of participants in a legal fellowship suggested the firms discriminated against white men. The picture in question, she wrote, documented “20 law students, at least 14 of whom are black students, one of whom is an Asian student, and 8 of whom are women.” While former EEOC officials say the agency is barred from publicizing employers it is actively investigating before filing suit, Lucas named and shamed the firms without identifying a single individual alleging discrimination. The tactics are increasingly reminiscent of America First Legal, which tried to grab headlines this summer by making an EEOC complaint against the Los Angeles Dodgers,^[11] citing a commitment on the team’s website to sponsor “programs geared to women and people of color.”

While the EEOC did not respond to requests for comment, staffers say Lucas isn’t merely perverting the agency’s mission and defying established legal precedent by following in Miller’s footsteps, but upending the EEOC’s entire premise. “I just chafe every time she sends an email out, because I know it’s going to be ridiculous,” Ortiz says, “not only against the mission of the EEOC, but against actual regulatory and Supreme Court holdings.”

The landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act not only outlawed segregation in public places, but barred employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin, or religion. To ensure this section—known as Title VII—was followed, Congress created the EEOC. It later expanded it to protect people from discrimination based on pregnancy, disability, and age; in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled Title VII also shields LGBTQ workers.

Title VII covers both majority groups and marginalized ones, and the EEOC has gone to bat for both. An EEOC database^[12] tracking nearly 140 Title VII lawsuits it filed and settled over the last decade shows that the largest share, about a third, involved discrimination against Black or Hispanic people. About a quarter were sexual harassment, mostly against women. Only one settlement involved the targeting of white employees, when the EEOC won $60,000 for white workers^[13] at a North Carolina Hampton Inn after a Black staffer repeatedly called them “white trash” and sabotaged rooms they cleaned. Those numbers make it impossible to suggest—as Miller and Lucas do—that white people are particularly targeted. “The vast weight of the evidence demonstrates that people still face barriers on the basis of race and sex and national origin and the existence of disability,” Samuels says.

While it is a federal offense—punishable by jail time—for agency staff to leak preliminary charges to the press, an EEOC charging document targeting Harvard and issued at Lucas’ sole discretion was published by the conservative Free Beacon even though a formal legal complaint hadn’t been filed in court. Over six pages, she accused^[14] the university of “engaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight” job applicants and employees. Lucas cited data Harvard had made public to chart modest progress in diversifying its staff over the past decade. Those figures still show white men hold well over half of its tenured faculty positions—far above their proportion in the US population.

Harvard academics and other job applicants who believe they’ve faced discrimination over paleness or maleness can check out a how-to guide added to the EEOC’s website after Trump put Lucas in charge: “What To Do If You Experience Discrimination Related to DEI at Work.” But for folks like Bringuel, who allege harassment because they are trans or nonbinary, there’s little hope they’ll find the Trump-era EEOC sympathetic. A staffer tells Mother Jones that newly filed complaints involving harassment of a trans or nonbinary person are simply not being pursued: “They’re sitting in a digital filing cabinet with no investigative steps taken whatsoever.”