Trump Agencies Seek White Men for Hard-to-Prove Job Bias Cases

Federal civil rights agency leaders shifting enforcement to protect White men from alleged workplace bias are set to hit hurdles finding plaintiffs and proving discrimination in court.

The heads of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division have turned to social media and other outreach tools to reach White men, who are not historically prime filers of bias suits.

The agencies have been vocal about helping President Donald Trump dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion, including using Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to claim “majority-group” bias.

“This administration’s comfort zone has been in the realm of bluster and threats,” said David Glasgow, executive director of NYU’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. “It remains to be seen whether they’re equally as good at proving cases in court following accepted legal standards.”

Social Media Outreach

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas recently posted a video on X encouraging White men to file workplace discrimination charges.

The agency generally waits for workers to bring charges, and doesn’t focus on one particular protected class, said former Democratic Commissioner Jocelyn Samuels, who was fired by Trump last year.

“I have not seen a video message from any commissioner urging a particular protected group to file charges so that the administration has a platform to pursue its policy agenda,” she said.

In March, Lucas sent letters to law firms requesting information about their diversity programs, and created a designated email address where individuals could submit information about “potentially unlawful” practices.

Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has referred to social media as a “very valuable tool” to spot areas of investigation. She recently posted on X that “we often rely on members of the public flagging complaints,” responding to a musician alleging online he was wrongfully denied a role at the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra due to DEI initiatives.

This social media-centered approach, former DOJ lawyers say, departs from the typical process of closely vetting discrimination claims internally before the department publicly comments or decides to investigate.

The administration’s outreach methods educate the public about how anti-discrimination laws also apply to majority groups like White men, said Gene Hamilton, president of the Stephen Miller-founded advocacy group America First Legal (AFL).

“They’re not going to do that by sitting idly on the sidelines and hoping to God that people realize this,” he said.

A New Approach

The agencies issued joint guidance in March warning how DEI programs could be discriminatory.

The EEOC typically uses deductive logic, by prioritizing enforcement where patterns are identified of large numbers of certain types of charges, said Stacy Hawkins, a professor at Rutgers Law School.

But the Trump administration’s approach is inductive, by taking some charges to indicate a problem and identify other cases that are consistent with it, she added.

Data breaking down bias charges and litigation by the plaintiff’s race is scarce.

But charges received by EEOC and state fair employment practice agencies between 2012 and 2016 show men are a quarter as likely as women to file, according to data analyzed by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

White workers are about half as likely as Hispanic, quarter as likely as Asian, and 90% less likely than African American workers to file charges, he said.

The EEOC declined to share more recent data on charges filed by White men, referring Bloomberg Law to broader enforcement statistics. The DOJ declined to comment.

“The people who come asking for help with discrimination in the workplace do not tend to be White men,” said Mikael Rojas, a former political appointee at the Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration.

Ejaz Baluch, a former senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division’s employment litigation section from Trump’s first administration through the beginning of his second, said he only worked on one DOJ case stemming from a White individual alleging employment discrimination. The case, which involved an employer’s alleged preference for immigrants over other employees, was dropped after an internal DOJ evaluation found several evidence-related issues, Baluch said. He resigned from the DOJ in May 2025 after an involuntary reassignment.

The division under the second Trump administration filed several lawsuits and launched investigations into DEI at universities and federal funding recipients.

These were often based on requests from conservative legal advocacy groups like AFL, one of several organizations that’s contributed to a recent uptick in anti-DEI discrimination lawsuits that target companies over issues like diversity trainings and hiring goals.

SCOTUS Standards

Recent US Supreme Court employment discrimination rulings could bolster White men’s claims.

The Ames v. Ohio Youth Services decision in June said workers in a majority group need not meet a more rigorous evidentiary test to bring bias claims.

Following Ames, it’s likely the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division would be willing to take up cases referred by the EEOC involving White male plaintiffs, said Dena Robinson, who worked as a senior trial attorney in the division’s employment litigation section during the Biden administration.

Rutgers’ Hawkins said the idea that Ames makes it easier to litigate such cases creates a “false sense of optimism,” since most circuits were already under that lowered standard. It may help some survive early dismissals, but a worker still needs to prove discrimination, she said.

The April 2024 Muldrow v. City of St. Louis decision lowers the bar by allowing workers to sue under Title VII if they’ve experienced only “some harm.”

However, that harm still must be tangible. A White man bringing a claim can’t just cite a diversity program without showing how it harmed him, Hawkins said.

Requirements for employees to attend diversity trainings, for example, would not be enough to meet Muldrow’s standard for demonstrating harm, Baluch said.

“The White man needs to experience a significant amount of harassment as a result of that training in order for such a claim to be viable, and that’s just really rare,” he said.