Great Society to DEI Fury: Agency Trump Cut Was Antibias Bastion

Former Labor Secretary John Dunlop foresaw a day when his department’s watchdog for employment bias at federal contractors would no longer exist.

If it succeeded, someday it wouldn’t be necessary, he reasoned. If it remained, it would be because it had failed.

Fifty years later, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs is on the verge of shutdown—but not for the reasons Dunlop posited. Instead, it became one of President Donald Trump’s first targets to curtail diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and affirmative action that he termed “illegal discrimination” in an executive order cutting most of its powers.

“Its time came,” said Larry Lorber, who was OFCCP director under Dunlop, during President Gerald R. Ford’s administration. “And maybe it’s time for it to go away and see what else happens.”

The tiny agency’s virtual demise may have gone unnoticed by many Americans not working in corporate human resources departments. But over the past 60 years, it’s been arguably the federal government’s most potent force in integrating federal contractors’ workforces.

In the decade preceding Trump’s return to office, the OFCCP obtained more than $260.8 million for more than 250,900 employees, according to DOL data. It won discrimination settlements with companies including Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Enterprise Rent-A-Car Co., FedEx Corp., JP Morgan Chase & Co, and Wells Fargo & Co.

Most of its power to police contractors for race and sex-based bias stemmed from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s executive order 11246 signed in 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement, which established what would become the OFCCP. It took Trump two days into his second term to rescind Johnson’s order. The latest federal budget plan contained appropriations for the OFCCP, but it remains stripped of its authority on race and gender discrimination — a move a Labor Department spokesperson said was done to “align with its lawful scope.” Most of its employees have left or been transferred.

“I was truly devastated by that action,” Cari Dominguez, agency director during President George H.W. Bush’s administration, said of Trump’s decision. “Some sort of regulatory oversight needed to stay in place to make sure that the gains that they made and opportunities that others have had did not happen in vain.”

Over the years, it’s been a lightning rod for Republicans who accused it of setting illegal hiring quotas. Even some agency supporters say the audit process could at times be excessive. Yet no president until Trump undid Johnson’s order. Even in the first Trump administration, the agency secured a record $40.5 million in settlements during fiscal year 2019.

But opposition to anything seemingly connected to DEI mounted between Trump’s exit and return to office. Lawsuits targeting diversity programs were filed by conservative legal advocacy groups, including ones with ties to Trump officials, in part fueled by the US Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision. Rescinding Johnson’s order and eliminating the agency became a goal in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for how a second Trump administration might operate.

Power of the OFCCP

The office’s unique power was in the annual audits it conducted at tens of thousands of companies that do business with the federal government. The government held federal contracts worth $809.3 billion in FY 2025, according to Bloomberg Government data.

Contractors were required, until Trump rescinded the order, to create affirmative action plans that compared the makeup of women and minorities in their workforce to the pool of available workers to recruit. During an audit, contractors had to show they opened recruitment methods to find qualified applicants.

Unlike with other agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the OFCCP could take enforcement actions—especially on pay and hiring bias —without getting a complaint, on behalf of workers who may not have realized they’d experienced discrimination. Pay discrimination alleged in EEOC charges is often discovered by chance, like through a paper left at a copy machine or a misdirected email, said Jenny Yang, an Outten & Golden LLP attorney, who served as OFCCP director during the Biden administration.

Its power to act from evaluating the data was particularly important for women and minorities who took jobs in fields where they’re not widely represented and didn’t want to “ruffle feathers” by filing complaints, said Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families.

For instance, the agency in recent years had focused on getting contractors to recruit more women into construction and prevent their harassment. In 2020 roughly one in 10 construction workers was a woman. About 1.2 million women were employed in the construction industry that year, compared to about 975,000 in 2003, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Even the specter of a potential audit kept contractors aware of ensuring their employment decisions weren’t discriminatory, Dominguez said.

“It’s not about giving one group preference over another. It is really to make sure that the playing field is level and everybody who brings over credentials can compete fairly,” she said.

That also made the agency vulnerable to decades of changing political attitudes towards affirmative action and diversity initiatives.

Establishing Guardrails

The OFCCP’s origins date to 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order banning race discrimination at federal agencies, unions, and companies engaged in war-related work.

The order led to some progress, but its enforcement was weak in the South and Congress sought to defund the efforts, according to an agency history by the National Partnership for Women and Families.

At a commencement address at Howard University a few months before he issued his order establishing what would become the OFCCP, Johnson underscored the need for such enforcement in what he called the “next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.”

It was just a couple of months before he would sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Johnson said in his speech would be the latest and “among the most important” civil rights developments, but not the end.

“We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result,” he said.

Two years after signing EO 11246 Johnson amended his order to include a ban on sex discrimination.

The agency officially became the OFCCP in the 1970s around the time Congress gave it oversight of bias against disabled workers and veterans. But most OFCCP functions were granted through executive action, which made it an easier mark for Trump and Project 2025 than many other agencies.

One of the agency’s first high profile wins came in 1983, when it reached a $14 million settlement with Harris Trust and Savings Bank that benefited roughly 5,000 current and former women and minority employees. It was the largest back-pay award in US history at the time. The case took more than 10 years, and showed a willingness to follow through on demands for equal pay and hiring.

Agency Opposition

When Lorber was director, he heard from businesses accusing the agency of setting hiring quotas, and from workers’ rights groups who said the agency wasn’t doing enough.

At the time, the agency was altering its regulations to increase the thresholds by employment at which contractors were subject to OFCCP rules and inheriting newly established responsibilities for mitigating bias against disabled workers and veterans.

One worker group, 9 to 5, published an article criticizing Lorber’s actions, along with an illustration of a dart board with his headshot at the center, he recalled.

At the same time, Lorber remembered, another editorial described him as “regulatory reformer of the year.”

“I was both a villain and a hero,” he said.

Photographer: Jonathan Hurtarte/Bloomberg Law

President Ronald Reagan floated a plan to abolish Johnson’s order, but it was stopped by civil rights groups as well as federal contractors that saw benefits from having the agency in place. House and Senate Republicans during President Bill Clinton’s administration proposed eliminating the agency’s ability to require affirmative action programs, painting the OFCCP as the “quota police.” And Trump considered cutting the OFCCP in his first term, in a failed budget proposal that would have merged it with the EEOC.

Critics focused on OFCCP’s scope of enforcement but still recognized the importance of combating discrimination, said Frye, of the National Partnership for Women & Families.

“So those efforts to undo the law entirely never went anywhere,” she said.

Republican presidents even occasionally made moves to strengthen the agency. Dominguez launched the Glass Ceiling Initiative, aimed at boosting women and minorities into higher level roles.

“The cultural feeling of what we were trying to do, which wasn’t to take anything away but to expand it and say, ‘let’s add’ — I don’t think that sense, that cultural sense, is there today because of the climate in which we are living,” Dominguez said.

The OFCCP in Trump’s first term increased transparency in how contractors were evaluated, said Craig Leen, the agency’s director at the time. “The antidiscrimination component is bipartisan, as long as it’s done with clear rules and companies are aware of how they are being viewed,” he said.

Trump’s Rollback

Project 2025, in its calls to axe the agency, said its work duplicated the EEOC’s and wrongly used “novel antidiscrimination theories” applying to sexual orientation and gender identity.

President Barack Obama in 2014 signed an executive order banning sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination by federal contractors, which was also rescinded by Trump. The Supreme Court in its 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling said federal laws against sex discrimination include protections for gender identity and sexual orientation.

Trump-appointed OFCCP director Catherine Eschbach told staff in a memo in March that most of its work was “out of step, if not flat out contradictory, to our country’s laws.”

The agency’s supporters reject that OFCCP was in what David Cohen, founder and president of DCI Consulting Group Inc., called “the DEI business.” Rather, they say, it mostly focused on evidence of discrimination it discovered in hiring or pay.

“I never in a million years said to someone, based on analyses you have to eliminate men and Whites from your applicant pool,” said Alissa A. Horvitz, co-founder of Roffman Horvitz, PLC.

OFCCP enforcement even recompensed roughly 24,000 White male alleged victims of discrimination between 2019 and 2024, according to agency data compiled by Cohen.

“I’m not saying OFCCP was perfect, or there weren’t problems with how they were doing things, but the administration threw the baby out with the bathwater,” Cohen said.

OFCCP’s audit selection process could be the “definition of insanity,” often auditing the same contractors repeatedly and requesting the same information even after they were found to be in compliance, Cohen said.

But the overall mission and its enforcement powers resulted in contractors less likely to engage in discriminatory practices, he said, and by rescinding Johnson’s order, Trump took the “nuclear option.”

Remains of OFCCP

The Trump administration sought to fire more than 300 of the agency’s roughly 500 employees. After a thwarted layoff attempt, those workers were reassigned.

A skeleton crew in one regional office and the national office remained as Congress funded the agency through a continuing resolution. The Labor Department declined to say how many employees remain.

“Everybody reports to work wondering the same thing, ‘are we dead yet?’ The answer, ‘nope, we’re not dead yet,’” said one OFCCP employee, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation.

The positions former employees were transferred to aren’t necessarily compatible with the civil rights work they did at the OFCCP and often felt passionate about, one former worker said.

“The first thing I told my friends and family when I got this reassignment is, I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. I just feel like I’m there,” they said.

While the White House eradicates the OFCCP’s functions other than its legal mandate for veterans and people with disabilities, former officials and workers advocates said it may someday revive.

An agency with OFCCP’s auditing powers could be a critical resource as artificial intelligence tools are used more in hiring and employment, Yang said. As with pay decisions, potential AI bias can be difficult for workers to discern and report.

Workers’ expectations are different in 2026 than 60 years ago, Frye said.

“The reasons we got it in the first place is the reason we will get it back,” she said.