The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has long been a cornerstone in upholding the civil rights of U.S. workers. Established under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the EEOC is a five-member, bipartisan commission appointed by the president to enforce federal laws against employment discrimination. The Trump administration, however, has taken actions that undermine the effectiveness of the EEOC through legally questionable firings and proposed changes to data collection that are key to the EEOC’s enforcement processes.

The long-term consequences of weakening the agency threaten not only economic equity and worker protections but also economic growth. In fact—after extrapolating from widely cited research on the impacts of reduced discrimination on GDP per capita growth—we estimate that reduced discrimination boosted average living standards by $4,932 per person since 1960. If we assume the EEOC’s role in reducing discrimination accounts for 10–25% of that growth, then the agency has helped to boost average living standards by $493 to $1,233 per person since 1960.

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During the first 100 days of this administration, Trump has unrelentingly attacked the federal workforce, creating an environment of chaos and inefficiency that will make it harder for federal workers to provide public goods that we all rely on.

Most notable are Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, including firing thousands of probationary employees, offering buyouts, and directing federal agency heads to reduce the size of their departments. Trump has attacked federal workers’ collective bargaining rights, from limiting recognition of recently ratified collective bargaining agreements to attempting to strip more than 1 million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights for purposes of “national security.”

Trump has also issued executive orders to remove civil service protections from certain federal workers, making it easier to fire those who do not abide by his political interests. Most recently, the Trump administration proposed a rule creating the “Schedule Policy/Career” classification, which could result in thousands of federal workers being reclassified and becoming “at-will” employees—meaning they can be fired without reason.

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On March 1, President Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14224, designating English as the official language of the United States. This order revoked EO 13166, issued in August 2000, which aimed to improve access to federal programs for individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP). It also directs the attorney general to rescind and revise federal guidance on language access—potentially leading to the removal of critical documents for LEP communities.

While the new order does not explicitly prohibit agencies from providing services in languages other than English, it leaves such decisions to the discretion of agency leadership. This may disrupt efforts by recipients of federal funding—like state and local governments, school districts, and health care providers—to serve individuals with LEP, even though recipients of federal funding are prohibited by law from discriminating based on national origin. It is also likely to result in less coordinated and consistent language access across federal programs.

In the absence of strong federal coordination, state and local policies will become increasingly critical to ensuring that language barriers do not impede access to essential government services and communications. With a limited number of states with laws expanding language access, immigrant workers and their families are the most vulnerable to these changes—especially Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Without language accessibility, these communities are at greater risk of being denied access to social programs and their labor rights—including protections against wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and discrimination.

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This piece was also published on Medium.

For decades, Americans were evenly divided in their relative support of labor unions and big business, but that’s no longer the case. Now, Americans are more likely to side with labor than at any time in the past 60 years. For people whose instincts about economic and political conflicts between unions and big business were honed more than a decade ago, it’s time to update your understanding.

According to newly released American National Election Studies (ANES) data from late 2024, analyzed and reported here for the first time, Americans feel more positively toward labor unions and more negatively toward big business than any time since ANES began asking the question in 1964. Using consistent methods to allow comparability over time, ANES uses representative samples of Americans and asks them to rate their feelings toward labor unions and big business on a 0–100 scale.

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While still lagging the rest of the country regarding workers’ access to paid leave, several states in the South—including Alabama and Mississippi this year—have begun to take the small but welcome step of ensuring paid parental leave to some public employees. While these laws cover only certain groups of workers and solely provide the paid parental portion of Paid Family and Medical Leave, they nevertheless represent an important step toward achieving more comprehensive paid leave access across the South. Read more

Late last Wednesday night, the Missouri Republican-controlled legislature overrode the will of the state’s voters by repealing the paid sick leave portion of Proposition A, a ballot measure passed with 58% support in the 2024 election. This short-sighted decision is a step backward for Missouri’s working families and a violation of the democratic process.Read more

Following a growing trend, Republican lawmakers this year proposed legislation in Florida, Kentucky, and Ohio that would undermine federal laws on child labor, minimum wage, and worker health and safety protections. These proliferating state challenges to federal law are laying the groundwork for more extreme and dangerous Project 2025 proposals to allow employers across the country to hire children for hazardous jobs or to allow states to “opt out” of various federal labor standards like the minimum wage.

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Recent attacks on the Social Security Administration (SSA) by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and others in the Trump administration threaten the stability of this critical agency. In addition to endangering the financial well-being of millions of retired, disabled, and low-income people in the U.S., delays and disruptions also harm state and local economies dependent on this income. While Social Security’s “Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance” (OASDI) benefits amount to roughly 5% of national income as measured by GDP, they account for nearly 10% of the income that U.S. consumers can actually spend (as opposed to noncash benefits received by individuals and income flowing to businesses, governments, and nonprofits—all of which are included in GDP).

Since President Trump took office, SSA has announced plans to terminate 7,000 staff positions and close field and regional offices, which has led to long wait times, website crashes, and other disruptions. Trump, Musk, and other senior officials have repeatedly disparaged the agency, calling it a “Ponzi scheme” and alleging, without evidence, that millions of deceased people are receiving improper payments. Rapid policy shifts and reversals, including changes to the types of transactions that can be processed over the phone, have caused confusion among staff and beneficiaries alike, exacerbating the staffing shortage as panicked beneficiaries and would-be claimants flood the agency’s 800 number and field offices.Read more

The Trump administration has waged numerous attacks on workers’ rights during its first 100 days, as outlined in EPI’s recent report. Some of the most damaging actions include targeting millions of migrant workers who have been granted the ability to reside and work in the United States lawfully, and who are currently employed in key industries like construction, hospitality, and food processing. The administration has been ending, canceling, pausing, and declining to renew protections and work permits through programs like Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan Parole Program (CHNV), the Uniting for Ukraine Program, and others. And if leaving millions of workers without workplace rights wasn’t enough, they’re also targeting them for deportation—in part because workers with these protections are easier to find given that the government already possesses much of their personal information. Aside from being cruel and irrational, these actions will have negative economic impacts, hurting growth and causing employers to lose valuable employees.

Trump has already announced the cancelation of status for roughly 2 million people with TPS and parole, and more are on the horizon. Some of these efforts are paused because of litigation, but there’s little hope that the programs and precarious statuses will survive Trump’s attacks in the long term. Trump is also now instructing immigration judges to deny asylum to applicants before they’ve had an opportunity to have their cases fully heard in court—which would leave asylum-seekers without work authorization and make them targets for deportation, too.

Altogether, nearly 5.6 million people in the U.S. held a temporary but precarious immigration status in 2024, accounting for roughly 40% of the total unauthorized immigrant population of 13.7 million (see Table 1). This includes over 2 million people who are asylum-seekers. (The migrants who qualified for protections like TPS and parole, as well as asylum-seekers, are formally considered and counted as part of the unauthorized immigrant population; see explanations from Pew and the Migration Policy Institute, for example.)

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What is happening?

The Trump administration is advancing an anti-equity agenda that will make people in the U.S. sicker and less economically secure. In his first 100 days, Trump rescinded dozens of Biden-era executive orders designed to advance racial equity and directed federal agencies to end all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility offices and programs. His “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” EO takes direct aim at the pursuit of racial equity as a policy goal by attacking Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (and religion and sex as well in the case of title VII) in programs that receive federal funding and employment, respectively.

Trump’s order for government agencies to remove all content and materials related to equity from government websites—leading to the disappearance of words like “diversity,” “historically,” and “female” from government documents—clearly shows that his administration does not value the perspectives, lived experiences, and struggles of those who are not white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender. Trump’s anti-equity actions will stunt efforts to understand, measure, document, and address health and economic disparities. For all the attempts made by the Biden administration to treat equity as a federal policy goal, Trump’s objective is to reverse that progress.Read more