The EEOC’s Regulatory Agenda: 10 Signs of Intent

Specifically, the EEOC identified ten actions it intends to pursue, including regulatory proposals to rescind the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP), eliminate the annual EEO-1 report, and withdraw long-standing interpretive guidance on affirmative action and national origin discrimination. The EEOC’s regulatory agenda, as released in its latest submission in the federal Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, is a statement of the agency’s intent, but is not a change in existing law.

Quick Hits

• The regulatory agenda released signals the agency’s intent. These are planned actions at the proposed or final stage. The first, the rescission of the 1979 affirmative action guidelines, occurred on July 6, 2026, via a final interpretive rule published in the Federal Register, but most of the agenda, including the more consequential proposals for employers, has not been issued, and several items must still go through notice and comment before they take effect.
• Title VII remains unchanged. Every rescission on the EEOC’s regulatory agenda withdraws an agency guideline or report. Title VII, including its disparate-impact framework, remains in force and enforceable by private plaintiffs and state agencies.
• Rescinding the Uniform Guidelines removes the employer’s validation safe harbor while leaving the statutory disparate-impact liability intact. Employers may wish to keep collecting and analyzing workforce data and retaining validation records, all under attorney-client privilege, because the potential legal exposure persists.

What Was Published and What It Is

Each spring and fall, the federal government publishes the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, and agencies contribute their regulatory plans identifying rules scheduled for review, development, or finalization over roughly the next twelve months. The agenda provides transparency into an agency’s priorities. It does not carry legal force. An entry on the agenda is a plan to regulate, not a regulation. Further, the dates listed in the agenda are aspirational in nature, rather than hard-and-fast deadlines.

Under the Administrative Procedure Act, a substantive rule generally does not bind anyone until it has completed the required process and been published by the Office of the Federal Register with an effective date. Most final rules carry a minimum thirty-day delay before taking effect. Proposed rules must first go through a public comment period, and an agency can modify, delay, or abandon a proposal in response to comments or intervening events. Recent experience underscores the point: an approval briefly posted to the government’s own review website in June 2026 was corrected within days. Agenda entries and even completed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) actions can shift. Acting as though a proposal is already law risks noncompliance with obligations still in force, wasted effort, and exposure if the rule changes or does not survive. Nevertheless, the regulatory agenda may inform and educate employers on enforcement priorities and legal interpretations adopted by the EEOC.

The Ten Items

The agenda’s ten EEOC items fall into two groups by stage. Items at the final rule stage are further along; items at the proposed rule stage must still complete the notice-and-comment process. Interestingly, EEOC has not made any of the entries listed in the final rule stage available for public comment.

Selection-Procedure Rescissions (UGESP)

The two most consequential items for workforce analytics concern the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP), and they are on different tracks. The first (RIN 3046-AB43) would rescind the interpretive rulemaking portions of UGESP, the long-standing validation framework that tells employers how to demonstrate that a selection procedure with an adverse impact is nonetheless job-related and consistent with business necessity. The RIN places it at the final rule stage, with the agenda projecting a final action in November 2026 and an effective date in January 2027; however, no final rule has yet been issued. The EEOC’s own abstract states that this action “would not impact other agencies’ interpretation and application of UGESP,” a limitation on the rescission’s reach that appears in the entry itself.

A separate proposal (RIN 3046-AB45) would rescind the UGESP recordkeeping requirements, the obligation to retain validation documentation, and the requirement to retain records permitting analysis of selection procedures by race, sex, and ethnicity. It is only at the proposed stage and must still go through the notice-and-comment process.

The practical significance is narrower than the headline suggests. Even if both are finalized, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s prohibition on discrimination and its statutory disparate-impact framework, codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act, remain in place. What the rescissions remove is the agency’s roadmap for validating a challenged selection procedure, not the underlying liability. An employer with a selection procedure that produces an adverse impact still faces exposure from private plaintiffs and state regulators. Attorney-client privileged self-analysis may become more valuable with less official guidance.

Disparate impact is a statutory burden-shifting framework: once a plaintiff shows that a particular selection procedure causes a disparate impact, the employer must prove the procedure is job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity. Both halves of that framework, the plaintiff’s claim and the employer’s defense, live in the statute, and neither is removed when the EEOC withdraws its guidelines. What UGESP supplied was not the defense itself but the standardized method for proving it: a defined validation methodology and an agency-sanctioned framework that courts had long treated as the accepted way to demonstrate business necessity. Rescinding the guidelines does not eliminate the business-necessity defense, but it withdraws the safe harbor and the validation roadmap employers relied on to establish it.

One question remains genuinely open: whether courts will continue to treat UGESP’s validation principles as persuasive even after the guidelines are rescinded. Those principles reflect decades of validation science and Supreme Court of the United States precedent, and they may well continue to inform judicial analysis of business necessity as a matter of established practice, regardless of the regulation’s status. That uncertainty is itself a reason for caution. An employer that dismantles its validation records now, on the assumption that they no longer matter, may find them essential to a defense that still exists and may still be judged by the same standards.

EEO Reporting Rescission (EEO-1 and Companion Reports)

Another EEOC regulatory proposal (RIN 3046-AB37) would rescind the EEO-1 and its companion reports (EEO-2 through EEO-5) at 29 C.F.R. 1602. The EEO-1, which is filed annually, requires private-sector employers with one hundred or more employees to report employee data by job category and by sex, race, and national origin. The agency frames these as agency-created data collections that Title VII authorizes, but does not require, imposing a significant burden. The EEOC cites an estimated 5.2 million reporting hours and roughly $273 million in annual employer costs from its May 2023 Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) notice. The agenda also notes that, with the revocation of Executive Order 11246, the EEOC no longer has authority to collect contractor data for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) through the EEO-1.

This proposal is expected to be released in July 2026, with a comment period projected to run into September 2026 (though, as noted above, these dates are prone to delay). As a practical matter, the proposal raises questions about the timing of the 2025 EEO-1 filing cycle and whether those reports will ultimately be collected. Employers should not assume current reporting obligations have changed until the EEOC takes further action. Rescinding the report also does not eliminate the separate duty to collect and maintain applicant and workforce data, and the agency has continued to obtain such data through enforcement and to penalize employers that lack these records.

Interpretive-Guideline Rescissions (Affirmative Action, National Origin, and Sex Discrimination)

Three items withdraw older interpretive guidance that the EEOC views as outdated. The first (RIN 3046-AB39) rescinds the 1979 affirmative action interpretive rule as inconsistent with intervening case law. This is the first of the agenda items to reach publication: the rescission was published in the Federal Register on July 6, 2026, confirming that the agency is moving on its final-stage items on the timetable the agenda projected. A second (RIN 3046-AB40) rescinds the 1980 national origin guidelines, and the agency’s stated rationale is instructive for the broader theme: it explains that the guidelines’ presumption that English-only rules can violate Title VII conflicts with the 1991 amendments, which place the burden on the plaintiff to prove that a specific practice causes a disparate impact. In other words, the agency is grounding the rescission in the statutory disparate-impact framework, the very framework that survives all of these changes. A third (RIN 3046-AB44) rescinds the appendix to the sex-discrimination guidelines, a 1979 interpretation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act that predates the 2022 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). All three are at the final stage.

Pregnant Workers Fairness Act Revisions

A proposal (RIN 3046-AB36) would revise the EEOC’s PWFA regulations, including the interpretation of “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” It is at the proposed stage, with an NPRM projected for November 2026 and comments due in January 2027. Because this is a revision to regulations implementing a statute, employers may wish to watch the specific regulatory text closely when the NPRM issues (though any changes to the existing implementing regulations would only become effective after the rule is finalized).

Administrative Items (Records, Fair Employment Practice Agencies, and Notice-Posting Penalty)

Three of the regulatory agenda items are administrative. A records proposal (RIN 3046-AB38) would revise the availability-of-records rules, including public reading room requirements and charge-file requests. A procedural rule (RIN 3046-AB41) would move the list of designated fair employment practice agencies—state and local agencies that often partner with the EEOC to enforce antidiscrimination laws—from the regulation to the agency’s website. A final item (RIN 3046-AB42) is the annual inflation adjustment to the notice-posting penalty, a routine statutory requirement. These carry a limited direct compliance impact for most employers.

Two Cautions the Agenda Does Not Mention

Two risks sit outside the four corners of the agenda but bear directly on how employers may wish to respond.

The first concerns the state-law implications. Every item on this agenda is federal deregulation, but state and local law are moving in the opposite direction in some areas, with some existing laws and enactments that are more protective than federal law. As the EEOC withdraws federal guidelines and proposes to end federal reporting, a growing number of jurisdictions are expanding pay-data reporting, mandating bias audits for automated hiring tools, and applying their own disparate-impact standards through active state enforcement. An employer that reads the federal rollback as a general green light and eases its compliance posture accordingly may step directly into state and local exposure that the federal changes do nothing to reduce. For multistate employers in particular, the practical compliance floor is increasingly set by the most demanding jurisdiction, not by federal law.

The second is the risk of treating a rescinded requirement as a reason to discard records. Even where a recordkeeping obligation is withdrawn, an employer’s litigation hold duties and its practical need to defend against claims do not disappear. Records that a rescinded rule once required may remain essential to defending a disparate treatment or impact claim, a pay-equity challenge, or a systemic investigation, and destroying them because the retention mandate has lapsed can create spoliation risk and strip an employer of its own best evidence. The end of a requirement to keep records is not permission to purge them.

Next Steps

The recurring theme across all ten items is that a plan to regulate is not a regulation. Employers may wish to consider the following:

• Not dismantling compliance infrastructure in anticipation. Because none of these items changes current law, discontinuing data collection, altering selection-procedure validation practices, or unwinding programs now may create risk under obligations that remain fully in force.
• Continuing to collect and analyze workforce data under privilege. The statutory disparate-impact framework and private and state-law claims survive every item on this list. Privileged, counsel-directed analysis remains the most reliable way to understand and manage exposure, and it becomes more important as official validation guidance recedes.
• Retaining validation and workforce records. Even where a retention requirement is proposed for rescission, existing litigation-hold duties, and the need to defend claims may make those records essential. Rescission of a requirement is not a reason to destroy the underlying documentation.
• Weighing the cost of reversal. Agency positions can be litigated or revisited by a future administration, as prior guidance has been. An employer that dismantles infrastructure now may have to rebuild it later, and the cost of overcorrecting and reversing is real.
• Monitoring the proposed-stage items and their comment periods. The EEO-1 rescission, the UGESP recordkeeping rescission, the PWFA revision, and the records-availability revision must all go through a notice-and-comment process, and the final text may differ from the proposal, so building to a proposed rule is premature. Employers and trade associations may wish to consider whether to submit comments.
• Tracking effective dates, not agenda dates. The agenda’s projected dates are planning estimates. Employers should not assume that any current obligation has changed until the EEOC takes further action, because obligations change only when a final rule is published with an effective date, and most carry a delay before taking effect.
• Distinguishing the guideline from the statute in internal communications. Where internal stakeholders may read headlines as “disparate impact is gone,” counsel may wish to clarify that the theory remains statutory and enforceable regardless of the guidelines’ status.
• Conducting this assessment under privilege. An employer’s own analysis of how these changes affect its exposure is exactly the kind of candid self-assessment that can become discoverable. Employers may wish to route that analysis through counsel for the purpose of legal advice.

The EEOC’s regulatory agenda tells employers where the agency intends to go. It does not tell them the law has changed, because it has not. A steady, well-documented, privileged compliance posture is the surest footing while these proposals move through the process, if they move at all.

Ogletree Deakins’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Compliance Practice Group, Government Contracting and Compliance Practice Group, and Workforce Analytics and Compliance Practice Group will continue to monitor developments and will provide updates on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Compliance, Employment Law, Government Contracting and Compliance, Governmental Affairs, and Workforce Analytics and Compliance blogs as additional information becomes available.

This article and more information on how the Trump administration’s actions impact employers can be found on Ogletree Deakins’ Administration Resource Hub.

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