The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has scheduled a vote, for July 21, on a proposal to eliminate the EEO-1 report [1]. That form is easy to overlook and hard to replace: since 1966, larger employers have been required to file it every year, breaking down their workforce by race, sex, and job category [2]. The notice setting the meeting lists a single agenda item - a draft proposal to rescind the EEO-1 and its companion reports [1].
The EEO-1 is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the standardized, government-wide dataset that makes systemic discrimination visible - the numbers regulators, researchers, and plaintiffs' lawyers use to spot when a company's hiring or pay diverges sharply by race or sex [2]. A pattern that no single worker can see from the inside often shows up in the aggregate data the EEO-1 collects [2].
What happens July 21 is a step, not the end. The vote is on a proposed rule to rescind the reports, which would then move through public comment before anything is final; until then, employers' obligation to collect and file the data remains [2]. The underlying proposal was sent to the White House budget office in May [2]. This is the formal beginning of unwinding a six-decade reporting requirement, not its last day.
The record worth naming is what would be lost. Enforcement of anti-discrimination law leans heavily on being able to measure it, and the EEO-1 is the measurement that has survived every administration since it began under Lyndon Johnson's [2]. Ending it would not change what the law forbids; it would remove much of the standardized evidence used to prove the law is being broken [1][2].
