The Trump administration has moved to stop requiring companies to report demographic data, undoing a 60-year-old precedent that Democrats and civil rights experts say could make it harder to enforce antidiscrimination laws.
Republicans on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is charged with enforcing civil rights laws against workplace discrimination, voted on Tuesday to end the agency’s decades-long practice of collecting race, sex and ethnicity workforce data.
The commission’s Republicans argue that these reporting requirements may actually lead to discrimination because they “may encourage employers to discriminate against employees who are not considered ‘minorities,’” the proposed rule reads.