Civil rights agency’s acting chief to face questions on anti-DEI, transgender stances

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The acting chief of the country’s top agency for enforcing worker rights will face questions at a Senate committee hearing Wednesday over her efforts to prioritize anti-diversity investigations while sidelining certain racial and gender discrimination cases and quashing protections for transgender workers.

Andrea Lucas, who was first appointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2020 and elevated to acting chief in January, is one of four Labor Department nominees to appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Her nomination to serve another five-year term as an EEOC commissioner requires Senate confirmation, though whether she stays on as chief will be up to President Donald Trump.

Lucas, an outspoken critic of diversity, equity and inclusion practices and promoter of the idea that there are only two immutable sexes, has moved swiftly to enact Trump’s civil rights agenda after he abruptly fired two of the EEOC’s Democratic commissioners before the end of their five-year terms, an unprecedented move in the agency’s 60-year history that has been challenged in a lawsuit.

Lucas is prioritizing worker rights that conservatives argue have been ignored by the EEOC. That includes investigating company DEI practices, defending the rights of women to same-sex spaces and fighting anti-Christian bias in the workplace.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, chairman of the Senate committee holding the hearing, has championed many of those causes. He accused the EEOC under the Biden administration of “injecting its far-left” agenda into the workplace, including by updating sexual harassment guidelines to warn against misgendering transgender workers and including abortion as a pregnancy-related condition under regulations for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Democrats on the committee are likely to grill Lucas over criticism that she overstepped her authority by profoundly shifting the EEOC’s direction to the whims of the president in the absence of a quorum, which commission has lacked since Trump fired the two commissioners.

Sen. Patty Murray, a member of the committee, said she will oppose any EEOC nominations unless Trump reinstates the two fired Democratic commissioners, which she and more than 200 other Democratic senators and Congress members condemned in a letter to the president as an abuse of power.

“President Trump is weaponizing the independent EEOC to serve his personal political agenda,…