In late February, Andrea Lucas sent a letter to the leaders of Fortune 500 companies.
The Trump-appointed chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) framed it as a friendly reminder of where she stood on a hot-button issue: diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
She directed the CEOs, general counsels and board chairs to guidance she'd issued last year warning that a company's DEI policies or practices may be illegal if they lead to employment decisions based even just in part on a person's race, sex or other protected characteristic.
"The EEOC stands ready to combat such discrimination," she wrote, adding for emphasis: "We are the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, not the Equitable Employment Outcomes Commission."
In an accompanying statement, she said she was urging corporate America "to reject identity politics as its solution to society's ills."
"The only lawful way to stop discrimination on the basis of race or sex, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race or sex," she wrote.
While not her first missive about DEI, the letter underscored how radically Lucas is changing the priorities of an agency that had long focused its efforts on protecting vulnerable and underserved workers.
In a probe Lucas initiated in 2024, the EEOC is investigating Nike's hiring goals and career development practices to see whether they disadvantage white people. The agency got a Planned Parenthood affiliate to agree to pay $500,000 to settle charges of harassment and discrimination against white people. Late last year, Lucas herself made a direct appeal to white men to come forward if they believe they've been disadvantaged due to their sex or race.
"We're working hard to attack race discrimination in every single form that it comes," she told NPR in an interview, emphasizing that it doesn't matter who's the victim or who's the oppressor. "If you're being treated differently based on race, the exact same rules apply to you."
An agency born out of the Civil Rights Movement
The EEOC was established through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as Congress sought to remedy the vast racial injustices faced by Black Americans. At its peak in the early 1980s, the agency had more than 3,000 employees. Today, it's down to about 1,740 employees, according to the Office of Personnel Management, with hundreds of departures since President Trump returned to the White House last year.
While Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes clear that the same protections against discrimination apply regardless of a worker's race, color, religion, sex or national origin, limited resources have always forced the EEOC to pick and choose cases based on which it believes will have the most impact.
Under Lucas' leadership, staff members have continued to work through tens of thousands of discrimination complaints, recovering money for women who have been sexually harassed on the job, Black people denied work opportunities and — under the Americans with Disabilities Act — workers denied accommodations by their employers, among other such common cases.
But former leaders of the agency say Lucas is also using its increasingly scarce resources to pursue an agenda at odds with its traditions and even its mandate. In addition to the cases challenging DEI, they point to the agency's decision to dismiss multiple lawsuits it was fighting on behalf of transgender and nonbinary individuals, its reversal of earlier decisions establishing protections for transgender workers and the rollback of its comprehensive harassment guidance.
"All of that says to me that there's a real radical effort to advance one ideological perspective with the resources that they have," says Charlotte Burrows, who preceded Lucas as chair of the EEOC during the Biden administration. "Civil rights enforcement should never be a partisan political game."
Early last year, Trump fired Burrows, along with her fellow Democratic commissioner Jocelyn Samuels, well before their terms were set to expire. It was something no president had ever done before and paved the way for Republicans to have a majority on the bipartisan commission.
How a childhood experience shaped Lucas' views
As a child growing up in Ohio, Lucas experienced a series of events that would shape her views on employment and civil rights. Her father worked in sales for a small business. A religious man, he refused to take clients to strip clubs and bars as he was pushed to do by his employer.
"In response to that and other discussions about his faith, he suffered the consequences," Lucas says.
She was 10 when he was fired.
For six months, he was unemployed. The family had no income. Eventually, Lucas says, her father took a worse job and found himself locked in a noncompete agreement working under a bad boss.
"It really shifted the course of my family's economic life thereafter," she says.
Lucas says her father never considered filing any kind of complaint or suing his former employer. It was not something her family could have afforded anyway, she says.
The experience made her realize that what's most important is ensuring that people have equal opportunity to begin with.
"Because while our work is deeply important to try to remedy harm, in the best-case scenario, it doesn't happen at all," she says.
It's not a statement that any of her counterparts, present or former, would quibble with. It's whom she's choosing to focus on that has caused a deep divide.
An appeal to white men
By late last year, Lucas had already made clear how she feels about diversity, equity and inclusion.
Then came her video on X.
"Are you a white male who's experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?" says Lucas, looking straight into the camera. "You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the EEOC as soon as possible."
The video garnered more than 6 million views and was shared by Vice President Vance.
Lucas told NPR she made the video after reading Jacob Savage's essay, "The Lost Generation." A once-aspiring screenwriter, he chronicled the ways his generation of men has been shut out of professional opportunities.
"I felt that it was important to let everyone know that the doors are open to them. And that includes white men," she says.
A DEI surge after George Floyd
Lucas felt the agency hadn't adequately done that in the Biden years. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, she says, her fellow commissioners stood by as corporate America rushed to embrace DEI, sometimes in legally questionable ways.
"I think that the prior administration really viewed that word as sort of a magic wand to ignore the implications," she says.
To be clear, Lucas says, she never saw her colleagues across the aisle bless any unlawful DEI practices, such as creating pathways to jobs exclusive to certain groups. But, she says, they pulled punches.
"They wanted to believe that these things either weren't happening or these aren't the things that they should emphasize or prioritize for enforcement," she says.
Now, Lucas says, she's cleaning up their mess.
Burrows calls Lucas' recounting of events "pure fiction."
"It's not surprising to me that this kind of gaslighting would continue," she says. "But it's just not accurate."
Burrows says under her watch, the agency faithfully followed the law. She saw no evidence that charges from white workers over DEI policies were piling up or being ignored.
NPR asked the EEOC to provide a breakdown, by race, of discrimination charges filed with the agency since 2021. The agency declined to share that information.
Burrows says she did see companies struggling with how to meet the moment — how to calm the waters and better protect their workers, including women and people of color, from discriminatory practices. They wanted to know how to do it and how to get it right.
"I thought it was incumbent on the agency — to the extent that we had expertise — to try and help them understand, because there are lines and it is possible to do things that are not lawful," says Burrows.
But her overall message to employers — then and now — is one of reassurance.
"You can absolutely create a lawful diversity, equity and inclusion program that benefits everybody," she says, as long as you include everyone and exclude no one.
A shadow EEOC fights back
Days after Lucas issued her letter to Fortune 500 companies, a group known as EEO Leaders wrote their own open letter to companies, telling them that Lucas' letter "may have raised more legal questions than it answered" and urging them not to back away from their DEI efforts.
Made up of former EEOC commissioners and other staff, the group has been providing counterprogramming at Lucas' every turn.
Chai Feldblum, who held a Democratic seat on the EEOC from 2010 through early 2019, says it was important to assure employers they can still form affinity groups and hold training to advance DEI, as long as they don't exclude anyone based on their race, sex or other protected trait. She worries Lucas' letter implies otherwise.
"It is frightening employers from taking positive actions in their workplaces, and it is failing to help those people whom the law actually requires them to help," says Feldblum. "This is not helpful in terms of stopping discrimination — real discrimination — in our country."
In fact, in a pair of cases dating back decades, the Supreme Court ruled that companies can, in some instances, take limited steps to address clear race and sex imbalances in their workforces.
"I think that they would like to see those cases overturned," Feldblum says of the current EEOC.
A Coca-Cola distributor gets sued
The issue is being debated in court now.
In February, after failing to reach a settlement, the EEOC sued Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast, a soft drink bottler and distributor serving New England and upstate New York.
The case stemmed from a discrimination charge brought by a male employee in 2024, over an off-site networking event for female employees, who make up about 15% of the workforce, according to the company.
About 250 women participated in the event at the Mohegan Sun casino and resort in Connecticut, according to court documents, with some staying overnight. As part of the event, the employees heard top female executives speak about their career paths.
While Lucas would not comment on the specifics of the case, she says she believes such events aimed at advancing women's careers are quite common.
"But commonness doesn't necessarily make it permissible," she says. "How would you feel if a company paid for all of its male executives to go to a two-day retreat … and said to all the women, 'Sorry, you gotta stay home. Get back to work'?"
She appears unswayed by the EEOC's own data, which show that men outnumber women by nearly 2-to-1 in senior executive positions across the country.
"The answer to the old boys' club is not a new girls' club," Lucas says. "If we want to provide networking or training or mentoring or whatever perks, we need to provide it to everybody without regard to their sex or their race."
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