In 'Unprecedented' Move, Trump Fires EEOC Commissioners

President Trump fired two of the three Democratic commissioners of the federal agency that enforces civil rights law in the workplace, an unprecedented move aimed at implementing his crackdown on certain diversity and gender rights policies, the AP reports. The two commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, confirmed in statements Tuesday that they were fired late Monday night. Both said they were exploring options to challenge their dismissals, calling their removal before the expiration of their five-year terms an unprecedented decision that undermines the agency's independence.

The EEOC was created by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a bipartisan five-member panel to protect workers from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability and other protected characteristics. The US president appoints the commissioners and the Senate confirms them, but their terms are staggered and are meant to overlap presidential terms to help ensure the agency's independence. The two firings leave the agency with one Republican commissioner, Andrea Lucas, who Trump appointed acting EEOC chair last week, one Democratic commissioner, Kalpana Kotagal, and three vacancies that Trump can fill. Another Republican commissioner, Keith Sonderling, resigned after Trump appointed him Deputy Secretary of Labor.

The firing of Burrows and Samuels appears aimed at positioning the EEOC to aggressively crack down on employers with diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—policies that the Trump administration believes veer into discrimination in their attempts to support racial minorities, women, and other groups. Lucas, the new acting EEOC chair, issued a statement last week saying that she would prioritize "rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination; protecting American workers from anti-American national origin discrimination; defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women's rights to single-sex spaces at work." (In a similar move, a National Labor Relations Board member and the board's general counsel were also fired.)