Federal Government
Expert warns Trump’s drastic cuts to HHS will have far-reaching consequences
HRC’s HIV and LGBTQ health policy advocate shared his concerns with the Blade
Ten years ago, as the opioid epidemic ripped through communities across the United States, the recreational use of oxymorphone with contaminated needles led to an explosion of new HIV infections in southern Indiana’s Scott County.
In places like Austin, a city with about 4,000 residents, the rate of diagnoses quickly ballooned to levels seen in some of the hardest-hit nations of sub-Saharan Africa, more than 50 times higher than the national average.
Thankfully, by 2020, NPR reported that the area was rebounding from what was the most devastating drug-fueled HIV epidemic that rural America had ever experienced, with three-quarters of patients managing the disease so well with antiretroviral therapies that their viral loads were undetectable.
Five years after officials called a public health emergency over the outbreak in Scott County, Austin had opened new addiction treatment centers, support groups, and syringe exchanges.
Initially, Indiana’s response was sluggish. The state’s governor at the time, Mike Pence, opposed clean needle exchanges for 29 days before ultimately signing an executive order allowing for a state-supervised program.
The administration in which he would go on to serve as vice president, however, launched an ambitious initiative designed around the objective of ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S. by the end of the decade, using proven public health strategies including syringe exchanges.
NPR further noted “the administration’s HIV goals were championed” by Pence along with Trump’s U.S. Surgeon General, Jerome Adamsthe, who was Indiana’s health commissioner during the outbreak in Austin.
Still, the news service warned, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that 220 U.S. counties were vulnerable to outbreaks of HIV and other blood borne infectious diseases like hepatitis C.
“When you have these outbreaks, they affect other states and counties. It’s a domino effect,” Dr. Rupa Patel, an HIV prevention researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, told NPR. “We have to learn from them. Once you fall behind, you can’t catch up.”
Trump’s approach to public health, including efforts to prevent, detect, mitigate, and treat outbreaks of infectious diseases, looks radically different in his second term.
‘I don’t know why they hate public health so much’
The Washington Blade spoke with Matthew Rose, senior public policy advocate for the Human Rights Campaign, during a recent interview about the the administration’s dramatic cuts and mass layoffs that will totally reshape the way America’s health agencies are run under Trump’s secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“They’re dismantling all the things around” the first Trump administration’s Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. effort, he said, eliminating key positions and offices within America’s health agencies that support this effort, including by tracking progress toward — or movement away from — the 2030 goalposts.
Rose said there is no evidence to suggest the initiatives combatting HIV that were begun when Trump was in office the first time were ineffective, either in terms of whether their long term cost-savings justified the investment of government resources to administer them or with respect to data showing measurable progress toward ending the epidemic within the decade.
Therefore and in the absence of an alternative explanation,, Rose said he is left with the impression that the Trump-Vance administration does not care about Americans’ public health, especially when it comes to efforts focused on disfavored populations, such as programs supporting access to PrEP to reduce the risk of HIV transmission through sex.
The outbreak in Scott County “can happen over and over again, if we don’t have CDC surveillance,” he warned. “We’re still having a fentanyl crisis in the country that we don’t seem to really want to deal with, but you end up with outbreaks that bloom and bloom very quick and very fast.”
Rose added, “The really crazy thing is that they got rid of disease intervention and branch and response,” referring to the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention, specifically its Division of HIV Prevention, and the various branches within that division that are responsible for different aspects of HIV prevention, care, and research. They include HIV Research, Behavioral and Clinical Surveillance, and Detection and Response.
“These are literally the disease detectives that chase down outbreaks,” Rose added. “When there’s a syphilis outbreak in an area, when COVID came along and we had to trace COVID outbreaks, like, those folks are the folks who do this.”
If (or perhaps when) communities experience an outbreak, “We wouldn’t truly know what’s going on until probably 10 years later, when those folks’ CD4 counts finally crash to an AIDS diagnosis level,” he said, at which point “they’re very, very sick.”
“They’ll start looking like we haven’t seen people look since probably 30, 40 years ago,” Rose said, a time well before the advent of highly effective medicines that from the perspective of many patients turned HIV from a death sentence to a manageable disease.
Additionally, “every person that we lose to follow up and care, if they don’t know their status, that’s where the majority of new diagnoses come from,” he said, noting that without the CDC’s work “bringing people back into care,” there is “no way of tracking that.” HIV positive people will continue to potentially transmit the disease to others as “their own health deteriorates at levels that it doesn’t need to deteriorate at,” Rose said, “so, we make it worse.”
Along with the breakthroughs in drug discovery that led to the introduction of highly efficacious and well tolerated antiretrovirals, the use of PrEP by those who are HIV-negative to drastically reduce the risk that they may contract the virus through sex has put the goal of eliminating the epidemic within reach.
“One of the things we learned from things like the PROUD study,” Rose said, referring to randomized placebo-controlled HIV trials conducted in the U.K. in 2016 “ is that if you can get to the highest impacted folks, the most vulnerable folks, for every one person you get on PrEP, you’re getting anywhere from 16 to 23 infections averted.”
Disparities in health outcomes are likely to worsen
Rose noted that “we’re finally starting to stabilize” the disproportionately high rate of new infections among gay and bisexual Black men who have sex with men thanks in large part to the federal government’s work by employees and divisions that were cut by Kennedy’s restructuring of HHS, initiatives like culturally competent public health messaging campaigns for vulnerable populations, addressing subjects like PrEP, other prevention methods, the importance of regular HIV/STI screenings, and the availability of treatments for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
There is no way of knowing if any intervention was effective in the absence of “surveillance units” to monitor the disease’s spread through communities and track mitigation efforts, he said, adding that the gutting of these positions comes as “Latin men have actually been catching [up to] Black men in terms of new diagnoses” while rates among Black and Latina trans women remain high.
Along with NCHHSTP’s Prevention Communication Branch, the health secretary’s near 20 percent cut to CDC staff also eliminated the center’s Division of Behavioral & Clinical Surveillance Branch, its Capacity Development Branch, its Quantitative Sciences Branch, and its HIV Research Branch.
As a result, Rose said “You’re going to see these populations get hit hardest again,” communities that have long suffered disproportionately from the HIV epidemic due to factors like racial or income-based disparities in access to testing and treatment.
Broadly, the CDC is distinguished from other agencies because the Atlanta-based agency’s remit is focused to a significant extent on the population level implementation of public health interventions, endeavoring to change health outcomes, he explained. With respect to PrEP, for example, once the drug was shown safe and effective in clinical research and the evidence supported its use as a critical tool in the federal government’s effort to stop the epidemic, the CDC is responsible for work like making sure at-risk populations who are disinclined to use condoms can stick with (or are sticking with) the medication regimen.
The administration’s cuts encompass programs on the research side as well as the implementation side, Rose said. For example, he pointed to the “decimation” of divisions within the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which conducts studies on HIV interventions from the preclinical basic science stage to double blind clinical trials such as those that led to the introduction of injectable PrEP, which can be administered once every other month after the first two doses.
In fact, Rose said he worked alongside Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Dr. Anthony Fauci as head of NIAID, on the Microbicide Trials Network board looking for behaviorally congruent HIV prevention products for populations that might not wish to take an oral or injectable formulation of PrEP. He added that she is a “brilliant scientist” who helped him better understand the vaginal microbiome as well as the ways in which “we fall short on women’s health and women’s sexual health, and what that means in the context of HIV prevention.”
Together with other top officials like Dr. Jonathan (“Jono”) Mermin, who led the NCHHSTP, on or around April 1, Marrazzo was reportedly offered the chance to either be placed on administrative leave or relocate to Indian Health Service outposts in rural American Indian or Native Alaskan communities located in states like Montana, Oklahoma, and Alaska.
Infectious disease related risks and benefits of research extend beyond HIV
Rose stressed the risks presented by the administration’s decision to shutter divisions within NCHHSTP that were responsible for communications, education and behavioral studies around tuberculosis, especially provided how the disease is underdiscussed as a public health issue within U.S, borders — where rates of infection are elevated in certain communities, like unhoused and incarcerated populations, where queer folks are disproportionately represented.
The restructuring of NCHHSTP and NIAID also raises the chances of outbreaks of viral and bacterial infections spread through sex that these public health workers could have prevented or better contained, Rose said.
Instead, “for some reason, someone thought it was a good idea to get rid of labs at the Division of STIs,” at a time when “we’ve had increases in STIs for the last, like, six years,” including rising rates of congenital syphilis, “the one that kills babies” and increased diagnoses of the disease among gay men.
Additionally, Rose noted disparities in health outcomes for people living with hepatitis C are likely to worsen by the cessation of federal government initiatives to slow the spread of the disease — which co-infects one of every four patients with HIV and can be fatal if untreated because the virus can cause cirrhosis, cancer, failure of the liver — because direct acting antivirals that cure 95 percent of all cases are covered by most insurance plans only when the policyholder has already sustained severe liver damage.
Broadly, “the fact that we’re like, getting rid of the labs to test people means that we’re literally choosing to go backwards, stick our heads in the sand, and hope that no one has the ability to want to say anything,” he added.
Even populations who are less susceptible to infection with diseases like HIV stand to benefit from basic and clinical science research into the disease, Rose said.
He pointed to such examples as the drug discovery studies targeting a vaccine for HIV that ultimately led to the identification of combinations of antivirals that were capable of curing most cases of hepatitis C, the inclusion of participants with HIV in clinical trials that led to the introduction of Ebola vaccines, and breakthroughs in the biomedical understanding of aging that were reached through research into why patients with untreated HIV age more rapidly.
“We continuously find new scientific endeavors that are able to help the general population, but also able to help the LGBTQ population,” Rose said, as “the things that happen in the HIV space spill over to other places.”
“From the LGBTQ health perspective, and especially from the research side,” he said, “we have just, in the last decade, started to really think about what interventions those populations need — not just [with respect to] HIV, but [other health issues like] smoking, alcohol and substance use and abuse,” including “crystal meth, which is always the number two drug in most major cities.”
Likewise, as large swaths of America’s public health infrastructure are unraveled under the direction of the president and his health secretary, the dissolution of each position or each division should not be considered in isolation given (1) the interdisciplinary nature of the work in which these individuals and entities are engaged and (2) the administration’s efforts elsewhere to restrict access to healthcare, especially for disfavored populations like trans and gender-diverse communities.
“There’s first the attack on the research pipeline,” Rose said, such as the HIV Vaccine Trials Network’s identification of an urgent or unmet need (behaviorally congruent methods of HIV prevention for women) and its discovery of a new intervention through research and clinical trials (a ring worn inside the vagina that releases an antiretroviral drug to stop the virus from entering the body during sex).
“Then there’s the destruction of key health interventions,” he said. For example, “STI testing is a public health intervention. It keeps people healthy, and we’re able to reduce the amount of STI floating in populations” through regular testing and monitoring of new diagnoses. “Getting rid of programs that look at and support these [efforts] is really, really bad,” Rose said.
He noted that the administration has endeavored to restrict healthcare access along a variety of fronts, especially when it comes to transgender medicine for youth, Rose said, from working to pass regulations circumscribing the scope of the ACA’s coverage mandate to gutting the HHS Office of Civil Rights such that vulnerable populations have less recourse when they are denied access to care or experience unlawful discrimination in healthcare settings, and conditioning the government’s federal funding for providers and hospital systems on their agreement not to administer guideline directed, evidence based interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria in youth.
“Last year, CDC documented that we had reduced new HIV infections by 6% and by 23% and 26% in counties that were in the Ending the Epidemic jurisdictions,” Rose said.
In the face of these challenges shortly into the president’s second term, he said, “we will stand up to a scientific rigorous process every time, because we’ve done it every time, and every time we’ve done it, the world has been better for it.”
Federal Government
Two very different views of the State of the Union
As Trump delivered his SOTU address inside the Capitol, Democratic lawmakers gathered outside in protest, condemning the administration’s harmful policies.
As President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address inside the U.S. Capitol — touting his achievements and targeting political enemies — progressive members of Congress gathered just outside in protest.
Their message was blunt: For many Americans, particularly LGBTQ people, the country is not better off.
Each year, as required by Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the president must “give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.” The annual address is meant to outline accomplishments and preview the year ahead. This year, Trump delivered the longest State of the Union in U.S. history, clocking in at one hour and 48 minutes. He spoke about immigration, his “law and order” domestic agenda, his “peace through strength” foreign policy doctrine, and what he framed as the left’s ‘culture wars’ — especially those involving transgender youth and Christian values.
But one year into what he has called the “Trump 2.0” era, the picture painted outside the Capitol stood in stark contrast to the one described inside.
Transgender youth
In one of the most pointed moments of his speech, Trump spotlighted Sage Blair, using her story to portray gender-affirming care as coercive and dangerous. Framing the issue as one of parental rights and government overreach, he told lawmakers and viewers:
“In the gallery tonight are Sage Blair and her mother, Michelle. In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Before long, a confused Sage ran away from home.
“After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all-boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time. But today, all of that is behind them because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full ride scholarship to Liberty University.
“Sage and Michelle, please stand up. And thank you for your great bravery and who can believe that we’re even speaking about things like this. Fifteen years ago, if somebody was up here and said that, they’d say, what’s wrong with him? But now we have to say it because it’s going on all over, numerous states, without even telling the parents.
“But surely, we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will. Who would believe that we’ve been talking about that? We must ban it and we must ban it immediately. Look, nobody stands up. These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”
The story, presented as encapsulation of a national crisis, became the foundation for Trump’s renewed call to ban gender-affirming care. LGBTQ advocates — and those familiar with Blair’s story — argue that the situation was far more complex than described and that using a single anecdote to justify sweeping federal restrictions places transgender people, particularly youth, at greater risk.
Equality Virginia said the president’s remarks were part of a broader effort to strip transgender Americans of access to care. In a statement to the Blade, the group said:
“Tonight, the president is choosing to double down on efforts to disrupt access to evidence-based, lifesaving care.
“Rather than allowing families and doctors to navigate deeply personal medical decisions free from federal interference — or allowing schools to respond with nuance and compassion without putting marginalized children at risk — the president is instead advocating for reckless, one-size-fits-all political control.
“At a time when Virginians are worried about rising costs, economic uncertainty, and aggressive immigration enforcement actions disrupting communities and families, attacking transgender young people is a blatant political distraction from the real challenges facing our nation. Virginia families and health care providers do not need Donald Trump telling them what care they do or do not need.”
For many in the LGBTQ community, the rhetoric inside the chamber echoed actions already taken by the administration.
Earlier this month, the Pride flag was removed from the Stonewall National Monument under a National Park Service directive that came from the top. Community members returned to the site, raised the flag again, and filed suit, arguing the removal violated federal law. To advocates, the move was symbolic — a signal that even the legacy of LGBTQ resistance was not immune.
Immigration and fear
Immigration dominated both events as well.
Inside the chamber, Trump boasted about the hundreds of thousands of immigrants detained in makeshift facilities. Outside, Democratic lawmakers described those same facilities as concentration camps and detailed what they characterized as the human toll of the administration’s enforcement policies.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), speaking to the crowd, painted a grim picture of communities living in fear:
“People are vanishing into thin air. Quiet mornings are punctuated by jarring violence. Students are assaulted by ICE agents sitting outside the high school, hard working residents are torn from their vehicles in front of their children. Families, hopelessly search for signs of their loved ones who have stopped answering their phones, stop replying to text… This is un-American, it is illegal, it is unconstitutional, and the people are going to rise up and fight for Gladys Vega and all of those poor people who today need to know that the people’s State of the Union is the beginning of a long fight that is going to result in the end of Republican control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the United States of America in 2026.”
Speakers emphasized that LGBTQ immigrants are often especially vulnerable — fleeing persecution abroad only to face detention and uncertainty in the United States. For them, the immigration crackdown and the attacks on transgender health care are not separate battles but intertwined fronts in a broader cultural and political war.
Queer leadership
After delivering remarks alongside Robert Garcia, Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, took the stage and transformed the freezing crowd’s anger into resolve.
Garcia later told the Blade that visibility matters in moments like this — especially when LGBTQ rights are under direct attack.
“We should be crystal clear about right now what is happening in our country,” Garcia said. “We have a president who is leading the single largest government cover up in modern history, we have the single largest sex trafficking ring in modern history right now being covered up by Donald Trump and Pam Bondi In the Department of Justice. Why are we protecting powerful, wealthy men who have abused and raped women and children in this country? Why is our government protecting these men at this very moment? In my place at the Capitol is a woman named Annie farmer. Annie and her sister Maria, both endured horrific abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. As we move forward in this investigation, always center the survivors; we are going to get justice for the survivors. And Donald Trump may call this investigation a hoax. He may try to deflect our work, but our message to him is very clear that our investigation is just getting started, and we will we will get justice for these survivors.”
He told the Blade afterwards that having queer leaders front and center is itself an act of resistance.
“I obviously was very honored to speak with Kelley,” the California representative said. Kelley is doing a great job…it’s important that there are queer voices, trans voices, gay voices, in protest, and I think she’s a great example of that. It’s important to remind the country that the rights of our community continue to be attacked, and then we’ve got to stand up. Got to stand up for this as well.”
Robinson echoed that call, urging LGBTQ Americans — especially young people — not to lose hope despite the administration’s escalating rhetoric.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people that are standing up for you every single day that will not relent and will not give an inch until every member of our community is protected, especially our kids, especially our trans and queer kids. I just hope that the power of millions of voices drowns out that one loud one, because that’s really what I want folks to see at HRC. We’ve got 3.6 million members that are mobilizing to support our community every single day, 75 million equality voters, people that decide who they’re going to vote for based on issues related to our community. Our job is to make sure that all those people stand up so that those kids can see us and hear our voices, because we’re going to be what stands in the way.”
A boycott — and a warning
The list of Democratic lawmakers who boycotted the State of the Union included Sens. Ruben Gallego, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Chris Murphy, Adam Schiff, Tina Smith, and Chris Van Hollen, along with dozens of House members.
For those gathered outside — and for viewers watching the livestream hosted by MoveOn — the counter-programming was not merely symbolic. It was a warning.
While the president spoke of strength and success inside the chamber, LGBTQ Americans — particularly transgender youth — were once again cast as political targets. And outside the Capitol, lawmakers and advocates made clear that the fight over their rights is far from over.
Federal Government
Top Democrats reintroduce bill to investigate discrimination against LGBTQ military members
Takano, Jacobs, and Blumenthal sponsored measure
Multiple high-ranking members of Congress reintroduced the Commission on Equity and Reconciliation in the Uniformed Services Act into the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, aiming to establish a commission to investigate discriminatory policies targeting LGBTQ military members.
Three leading Democratic members of Congress — U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), who is the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s ranking member and chairs the Congressional Equality Caucus; U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who is the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s ranking member; and U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) — introduced the bill on Tuesday.
The bill, they say, would establish a commission to investigate the historic and ongoing impacts of discriminatory military policies on LGBTQ servicemembers and veterans.
This comes on the one-year anniversary of the Trump-Vance administration’s 2025 Executive Order 14183, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” which essentially banned transgender servicemembers from openly serving in the Armed Forces, leading to the forced separation of thousands of capable and dedicated servicemembers.
In a joint statement, Takano, Blumenthal, and Jacobs shared statistics on how many service members have had their ability to serve revoked due to their sexual orientation:
“Approximately 114,000 servicemembers were discharged on the basis of their sexual orientation between WWII and 2011, while an estimated 870,000 LGBTQ servicemembers have been impacted by hostility, harassment, assault, and law enforcement targeting due to the military policies in place,” the press release reads. “These separations are devastating and have long-reaching impacts. Veterans who were discharged on discriminatory grounds are unable to access their benefits, and under the Trump administration, LGBTQ+ veterans and servicemembers have been openly persecuted.”
The proposed commission is modeled after the Congressional commission that investigated and secured redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Takano’s family was among the more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who received an official apology and redress payment under that commission.
The press release notes this is a major inspiration for the act.
“Qualified servicemembers were hunted down and forced to leave the military at the direction of our government,” said Takano. “These practices have continued, now with our government targeting transgender servicemembers. The forced separation and dishonorable discharges LGBTQ+ people received must be rectified, benefits fully granted, and dignity restored to those who have protected our freedoms.”
“LGBTQ+ servicemembers have long been the target of dangerous and discriminatory policies—resulting in harassment, involuntary discharge, and barriers to their earned benefits,” said Blumenthal. “Establishing this commission is an important step to understand the full scope of harm and address the damage caused by policies like ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ As LGBTQ+ servicemembers and veterans face repugnant and blatant bigotry under the Trump administration, we will keep fighting to secure a more equitable future for all who serve our country in uniform.”
“Instead of righting wrongs and making amends to our LGBTQ+ service members and veterans who’ve suffered injustices for decades, I’m ashamed that the Trump administration has doubled down: kicking trans folks out of the military and banning their enlistment,” said Jacobs. “We know that LGBTQ+ service members and veterans have faced so much ugliness — discrimination, harassment, professional setbacks, and even violence — that has led to unjust discharges and disparities in benefits, but we still don’t have a full picture of all the harm caused. That needs to change. That’s why I’m proud to co-lead this bill to investigate these harms, address the impacts of discriminatory official policies like ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and the transgender military ban, and ensure equity and justice for our LGBTQ+ service members and veterans.”
Takano and Jacobs are leading the bill in the House, while Blumenthal is introducing companion legislation in the Senate.
Takano’s office has profiled and interviewed LGBTQ servicemembers who were harmed by discriminatory policies in the uniformed services.
The Commission on Equity and Reconciliation in the Uniformed Services Act is supported by Minority Veterans of America, Human Rights Campaign, Equality California, SPARTA, and the Transgender American Veterans Association.
In recent weeks, thousands of trans military members were forcibly put into retirement as a result of Trump’s executive order, including five honored by the Human Rights Campaign with a combined 100 years of service, all due to their gender identity: Col. Bree B. Fram (U.S. Space Force), Commander Blake Dremann (U.S. Navy), Lt. Col. (Ret.) Erin Krizek (U.S. Air Force), Chief Petty Officer (Ret.) Jaida McGuire (U.S. Coast Guard), and Sgt. First Class (Ret.) Catherine Schmid (U.S. Army).
Multiple career service members spoke at the ceremony, including Takano. Among the speakers was Frank Kendall III, the 26th U.S. Air Force secretary, who said:
“We are in a moment of crisis that will be worse before it is better. Members of my father’s and mother’s generation would ask each other a question: what did you do during the war? Someday we will all be asked what we did during this time. Please think about the answer that you will give.”
Federal Government
Trump-appointed EEOC leadership rescinds LGBTQ worker guidance
The EEOC voted to rescind its 2024 guidance, minimizing formally expanded protections for LGBTQ workers.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2–1 to repeal its 2024 guidance, rolling back formally expanded protections for LGBTQ workers.
The EEOC, which is composed of five commissioners, is tasked with enforcing federal laws that make workplace discrimination illegal. Since President Donald Trump appointed two Republican commissioners last year — Andrea R. Lucas as chair in January and Brittany Panuccio in October — the commission’s majority has increasingly aligned its work with conservative priorities.
The commission updated its guidance in 2024 under then-President Joe Biden to expand protections to LGBTQ workers, particularly transgender workers — the most significant change to the agency’s harassment guidance in 25 years.
The directive, which spanned nearly 200 pages, outlined how employers may not discriminate against workers based on protected characteristics, including race, sex, religion, age, and disability as defined under federal law.
One issue of particular focus for Republicans was the guidance’s new section on gender identity and sexual orientation. Citing the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision and other cases, the guidance included examples of prohibited conduct, such as the repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun an individual no longer uses, and the denial of access to bathrooms consistent with a person’s gender identity.
Last year a federal judge in Texas had blocked that portion of the guidance, saying that finding was novel and was beyond the scope of the EEOC’s powers in issuing guidance.
The dissenting vote came from the commission’s sole Democratic member, Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal.
“There’s no reason to rescind the harassment guidance in its entirety,” Kotagal said Thursday. “Instead of adopting a thoughtful and surgical approach to excise the sections the majority disagrees with or suggest an alternative, the commission is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Worse, it is doing so without public input.”
While this now rescinded EEOC guidance is not legally binding, it is widely considered a blueprint for how the commission will enforce anti-discrimination laws and is often cited by judges deciding novel legal issues.
Multiple members of Congress released a joint statement condemning the agency’s decision to minimize worker protections, including U.S. Reps. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.), Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), Mark Takano (D-Calif.), Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), and Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) The rescission follows the EEOC’s failure to respond to or engage with a November letter from Democratic Caucus leaders urging the agency to retain the guidance and protect women and vulnerable workers.
“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is supposed to protect vulnerable workers, including women, people of color, and LGBTQI+ workers, from discrimination on the job. Yet, since the start of her tenure, the EEOC chair has consistently undermined protections for women, people of color, and LGBTQI+ workers. Now, she is taking away guidance intended to protect workers from harassment on the job, including instructions on anti-harassment policies, training, and complaint processes — and doing so outside of the established rule-making process. When workers are sexually harassed, called racist slurs, or discriminated against at work, it harms our workforce and ultimately our economy. Workers can’t afford this — especially at a time of high costs, chaotic tariffs, and economic uncertainty. Women and vulnerable workers deserve so much better.”
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