©2026 Seyfarth Shaw LLP EEOC-INITIATED LITIGATION: 2026 EDITION | 2 The composition of the EEOC has changed in ways that are expected to reverberate through 2026. On July 31, 2025, the Senate confirmed then-Acting Chair Lucas to an additional term as Commissioner through July 1, 2030. On November 6, 2025, Lucas was designated Chair. Lucas has repeatedly articulated her continued alignment with the Trump Administration’s priorities. On October 7, 2025, the Senate confirmed Brittany Panuccio as the third Commissioner of the EEOC, restoring the EEOC’s quorum and establishing a Republican majority. On November 19, 2025, President Trump submitted to the Senate his nominee for General Counsel at the EEOC, naming M. Carter Crow, a management-side lawyer currently working as the Global Head of Employment and Labor for law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. With these personnel changes, we can expect to see the EEOC’s rule-making, investigation, and litigation priorities to stay centered around the Trump administration’s stated goals, which include ending DEI practices, favoring workers of American national origin, prioritizing accommodation of religious beliefs and opposing harassment based on religion, and particularly antisemitism, and defending a binary view of sex and related rights. Indeed, some noteworthy changes already have begun. On January 14, 2026, in its first public meeting of the Commission after the quorum was restored, Chair Lucas and Commissioner Panuccio voted to rescind voting procedures enacted in the final weeks of the Biden Administration, giving the Chair sole authority to set the agenda and dates for public meetings and to decide what issues will be voted on without a public meeting. On January 22, 2026, the Commission met again. During this meeting, the litigation delegation rules were changed by a 2-1 vote. Under the new rules, approval by a majority of Commissioners is required for substantially all litigation. The Commission also voted to rescind the 2024 Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace, with the document removed from the agency’s website before the end of the day. B. EEOC Recent Staffing Challenges and Budgetary Constraints Title VII confers on the EEOC’s Chair the sole responsibility “for the administrative operations of the Commission.” 5 The Chair is responsible for hiring members of the career Senior Executive Service, and evaluating and managing the EEOC’s cadre of Senior Executives. In other words, the Chair is directly responsible for hiring and evaluating the performance of the 15 District Directors across the country, as well as other Senior Executives in the agency. Moreover, the Chair’s responsibility for the “administrative operations” of the EEOC includes the ability, exercised through the EEOC’s Chief Operating Officer, to allocate the EEOC’s budget to its various programs and operational efforts. While the Commission as a whole must vote on certain appropriations, the Chair has broad authority in making adjustments—both large and small—to how the Commission spends its money. Chair Lucas and her staff are responsible for advocating before Congress for changes to the EEOC’s budget, and the Chair is also responsible for deciding exactly how the EEOC spends additional money appropriated by Congress. During the early years of the Biden Administration, the EEOC sought and received significant budget increases, which it invested in hiring front-line enforcement and litigation personnel. In more recent years, budget pressures have left the EEOC with less to work with. In FY 2023, the EEOC received $455 million in funding. For the following year, the EEOC sought a 5.7% increase, but Congress declined the request and held the EEOC’s budget at the previous year’s amount. This put the EEOC in a bind, as President Biden had earlier issued an executive order that granted federal employees a 5.2% pay raise, and pay and benefits already were the agency’s largest expense (74% of the EEOC’s budget). The mandated pay increase still had to be covered despite that the agency budget allocation remained flat, leading Chair Burrows to implement multiple fiscal austerity measures, including reduced hiring and cuts to various programs like reduced travel and training, and narrowly avoiding a furlough. The fiscal constraints continued into FY 2025. The EEOC again requested a budget increase, this time to $488 million, and Congress once again declined the request and held the EEOC’s budget at the same level as FY 2023. 5 See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-4
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