This is so wrong. From The Washington Post:
Trump officials start dismantling civil rights offices, as part of DOGE’s secret plan
Legal experts said that unwinding a civil-rights-era bulwark designed to safeguard employees’ rights removes a crucial check on institutional power.
Leaders at the Labor Department are planning to cut by 90 percent the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which for decades has worked to ensure that government contractors took affirmative action to end discrimination at their firms, documents obtained by The Washington Post show. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, has halved its internal equal employment opportunity office to three employees from six, and similar moves have taken place at NASA, where most information about how to file complaints has been removed from its websites.
The moves signal the Trump administration’s intent to deliver on U.S. DOGE Service plans for workforce cuts laid out in a series of documents obtained by The Post, which initially contemplated eliminating the civil rights functions altogether in violation of federal law.
The in-agency equal opportunity offices are mandated by statute toensure that employees receive equal opportunity “regardless of race, sex, national origin, color, religion, disability or reprisal for engaging in prior protected activity” and have been viewed with skepticism by the administration, which has sought to purge the federal government of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in furtherance of President Donald Trump’s goal “to forge a color-blind and merit-based” society.
And it has long been on some conservatives’ wish list to kneecap the external civil rights work of the Labor Department’s contract compliance office, which for decades has audited the nation’s largest contractors — including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Deloitte — to ensure fair pay and hiring.
Plans obtained by The Post show the office will maintain 50 employees to enforce discrimination law for veterans and workers with disabilities, but it will no longer be staffed to audit companies for pay and hiring disparities for women and minority workers. Much of that work had been halted since Trump last month overturned an antidiscrimination order signed by Lyndon B. Johnson, which established the office’s primary mission 60 years ago.
The erosion of private-sector guardrails is likely to deter people from reporting mistreatment, said Jenny Yang, who served as director of the agency during the Biden administration and presided over investigations of multiple large firms over gender pay disparities and hiring discrimination.
“They’re concerned about retaliation. They could lose their jobs,” Yang said. “And the real power of the OFCCP is that it required federal contractors to engage in proactive barrier analysis to really prevent discrimination.”
Legal experts said that unwinding a civil-rights-era bulwark designed to safeguard employees’ rights removes a crucial check on institutional power. The groundwork for such laws began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in employment and sought to promote the integration of the largely segregated U.S. workforce. Core laws protecting workers from discrimination and harassment remain in effect, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the primary enforcer of those laws — has not announced large reductions in workforce.
But the attack on equal employment offices within the federal government is concerning, said Larry Stein, a federal employment attorney, noting that they are required by civil rights laws and are a crucial extension of their principles.
“Harm to federal employees will occur when these severely short-staffed EEO offices are unable to process EEO complaints in a timely manner, which will allow discriminatory behavior on the part of federal managers to continue,” Stein said.
He added that the moves could have an outsize impact on minorities, women, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups within the federal government and come as all federal employees are in greater need of protections amid a time of rapid workforce transformation. “The goal here is to discourage the filing of EEO complaints to begin with, by adding interminable delay to a process that already takes far too long,” Stein said.
Lee Dudek, acting commissioner of Social Security, cast the closure of the agency’s EEO office as an efficiency measure in a statement announcing the decision. “Terminating the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, and reassigning statutory responsibilities performed by this office, advances the President’s goal to make all of government more efficient in serving the American public,” he said.
The office did not immediately answer questions about how the work would be redistributed.
The plans by DOGE — which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency — to cull federal agencies’ equal opportunity offices began before Trump was sworn in, documents obtained by The Post show. Those documents finger dozens of offices that protect employees’ civil rights or investigate claims of employment discrimination in the federal workplace for possible cuts to help Trump deliver on campaign promises to shrink the 2.3 million-person civil service.
DOGE intended for the Trump administration to identify members of statutorily required offices who could be tied to diversity efforts, the documents show. A DOGE document called such workers “corrupted branches.” DOGE planned for the administration to first place such employees on leave, then fire them via a reduction in force action — the government form of layoffs.
Throughout the process, planners stated the need to find legal justification for such firings, the documents show.
DOGE intended for the administration to enact trims at offices required by law between the 31st and 180th days of Trump’s presidency: from mid-February to mid-July. The cuts at NASA and Social Security, which was listed for targeting in a DOGE spreadsheet, came right on schedule.
The much smaller EEO office at the Federal Trade Commission has also been reduced, according to Stein, the attorney, who represented one of its workers. Days after Trump’s inauguration, the office was totally shut down with its functions transferred to the agency’s general counsel’s office, according to documents reviewed by The Post. The move was contrary to federal law, according to Stein.
The office has since been restored with three workers, half the former number, according to Stein.
The FTC declined to comment.
Nick Bednar, a University of Minnesota professor of law, said the EEO offices “play a significant role in protecting individual employees from discrimination and managing the culture of the workforce.”
“A lot of these agencies are required by statute, and by gutting these agencies they’re not able to perform the obligations that [are] placed on them and the morale within the workforce is going to degrade pretty quickly,” Bednar added.
The changes have left some employees confused about where to address their civil rights concerns.
At NASA, one employee discovered her equal employment office’s contact had been dismissed when she tried to email the employee with a request this week. The email bounced back with the message that the staffer “wasn’t found at nasa.gov,” according to a copy of the message obtained by The Post.
A NASA spokesperson told The Post that the agency’s EEO office reductions and the removal of information on its websites are meant to comply with Trump’s executive orders.
A Social Security Administration staffer, who has used the shuttered office to help navigate a disability, said she received no notice about the change internally, and instead found out by browsing public news sources.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, she described contacting colleagues and a manager for whom she happened to have personal contact information; she was too scared to ask questions on any internal platforms. The supervisor had no additional information.
“My reaction is shock and anger,” she said, adding that she has an accommodation that will have to be renewed in several months. “As a disabled employee, I don’t have a polite word for this. I want to cry.”
Joel Achenbach and Carol Leonnig contributed to this report.
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