Diversity Data for Thousands of Federal Contractors to Go Public

Diversity data for thousands of federal contractors is now in the hands of a nonprofit journalism outlet after years of legal bickering over its release by the US Labor Department.

The DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs handed over EEO-1 reports for 19,289 federal contractors to media outlets and posted them on the agency’s website on Monday. The EEO-1 form, which every federal contractor with 50 or more employees must file, includes demographic information about employees divided by gender, race and ethnicity, and job category.

The data is responsive to a Freedom of Information Act request the Center for Investigative Reporting first submitted in 2019. It includes nearly all federal contractors’ EEO-1 reports from 2016 through 2020. The CIR has said that EEO-1 forms from companies that do business with the government should be public so that “all journalists and the public can scrutinize the data.”

The OFCCP said it had to give each company a chance to object to their records being disclosed. The agency filed a Federal Register notice in August, inviting companies to file objections. It’s unclear how many contractors successfully objected and were omitted from the list produced to CIR.

The agency first told federal contractors earlier this month that the information would be released on or around Feb. 8. OFCCP extended that deadline several times before releasing the data.

House Education and the Workforce Committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) sent a letter to OFCCP Director Jenny Yang on Feb. 10 saying the agency hasn’t provided contractors “sufficient information and time to object to having their confidential data released” and called for a 60-day extension for companies to object.

“It further appears that many employers were not aware of the pending FOIA request at OFCCP,” Foxx said in the letter. “The agency must do a much better job of informing federal contractors, especially smaller employers, about their rights and obligations.”

The CIR sued the DOL in November for allegedly mishandling the request. The agency has previously argued that EEO-1 forms may be considered commercial and therefore exempt from FOIA.

Victoria Baranetsky, the CIR’s in-house attorney, said in a February email statement that the organization is “pleased to see any EEO-1s released as they are decidedly public information,” though CIR didn’t specify how the disclosure would impact the ongoing litigation.