The public comment period on the EEOC’s proposal to eliminate EEO-1 reporting closed on August 24. The docket contains 2,580 comments.
The overwhelming majority oppose rescission. That headline number isn’t worth much on its own: more than 1,800 submissions came through three organized comment campaigns, and regulatory comment periods aren’t elections.
So we went a level deeper. We downloaded the full docket, extracted every attachment and identified 118 substantive letters submitted by organizations. We coded them by position and organization type, then compared the arguments and language used by each side.
Of the 118 letters, 94 opposed rescission, 17 supported it, five took mixed positions and two were unclear.
Unlike the mass-comment campaigns, the organizational letters were overwhelmingly original. Only 12 of 118 share substantial text with another letter; 104 were independently drafted.
And the result was more interesting than the vote count. The two sides aren’t really arguing about the same thing.
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One dataset, two very different ideas about what it does
The language that most distinguishes the opposition includes data, workers, companies, investors, workforce, research, standardized and systemic.
The language on the other side looks completely different: Title VII, classification, disparate impact, Griggs, court, DEI and unlawful.
That difference carries through to the arguments themselves.
Forty-eight opposing letters discuss the value of EEO data for enforcement. Twenty-one say investors rely on it. Fourteen discuss the loss of historical trend data, and 13 its value to researchers and the public.
The 17 supporting letters focus much more heavily on what happens because the data exists. Thirteen discuss racial and sex classification, 12 raise constitutional concerns, 10 discuss disparate-impact doctrine and 10 address DEI programs. Nine raise employer cost and six raise time or staffing burdens.
That’s an interesting distribution for a rule formally titled Removal of Reporting Requirements. There is some paperwork in there. There is considerably more constitutional law.
The strongest case for keeping EEO-1 is essentially that it is measurement infrastructure: a standardized dataset that lets regulators, employers, investors and researchers identify patterns that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to see.
The strongest case for eliminating it is largely about legal infrastructure: collecting employees’ race and sex creates a record that can be used to identify disparities, support disparate-impact claims and encourage race-conscious corporate behavior.
Put differently, the fight isn’t principally over the paperwork required to produce EEO-1 data. It’s over what people can do with the data once it exists.
The supporters aren’t arguing against measurement
This is the part that gets lost in a vote count.
Several letters supporting rescission — and most of the mixed ones — explicitly argue that employers should continue collecting and analyzing workforce demographic data. What they object to is doing it inside a federal reporting regime that turns the results into evidence.
That is not an argument against measurement. It is an argument for measuring privately.
We already know what that looks like.
Companies don’t need to wait for the government to stop collecting EEO-1 data to stop making it public. Among S&P 500 companies, publication of EEO-1 reports peaked at 72.2% for report year 2023 and fell to 57.8% for 2024.
Those companies still filed their 2024 reports with the federal government. They simply stopped publishing them.
For report year 2025, the collection window never opened. Across our entire coverage universe, 32 companies have published 2025 data anyway — up from 26 a few weeks ago and including several first-time disclosers. Match Group published a 2025 report. Universal Health Services published for the first time using its 2024 filing.
So the trend isn’t perfectly linear. A handful of companies are beginning to publish just as the federal requirement may disappear.
But the broader direction is clear: companies can continue measuring their workforces while everyone outside the company gets to see less of the measurement.
Investors weren’t divided
For investors, at least, there wasn’t much ambiguity.
We identified 29 investment firms and investor organizations among the organizational comments. All 29 opposed rescission.
Their argument is consistent. EEO-1 is one of the few standardized workforce datasets that allows comparison across companies and over time. Individual companies can — and increasingly do — change what they voluntarily disclose from year to year. EEO-1 provides a common denominator.
One letter, from the Horizons Foundation, points to an unusually well-timed statement from the EEOC’s own Chair.
Speaking at Harvard in April, Andrea Lucas explained why the agency collects demographic information: “there is no other way to protect victims” of harassment or discrimination without it. She went further, saying she couldn’t protect Black workers without information about Black applicants and employees.
Less than a month later, the Commission proposed eliminating the reporting requirement that has supplied it with exactly that kind of workforce information for decades. Apparently the disagreement isn’t over whether employers should collect the information.
Which gets us back to the oddity at the center of this debate.
There is more agreement about collecting demographic information than you might expect. The disagreement is increasingly about who should have it and what they should be allowed to do with it.
The concern extends beyond investors. Twelve coalition letters carried 675 signatories, including one signed by 362 academic researchers and another representing 50 civil rights organizations.
A coalition of eight state civil rights agencies, including Illinois, New York, Michigan and Minnesota, urged the Commission to retain and modernize the requirement rather than rescind it. They also pushed back on the constitutional argument, noting that the federal government collects more granular demographic data in higher education and health programs.
There was one supporting coalition letter, led by Missouri and signed by 19 state attorneys general. An opposing letter led by Illinois and New York was signed by 21.
And there was one finding we didn’t expect: 11 organizational comment letters cited PeopleReturn’s tracking of corporate EEO-1 disclosure.
That wasn’t coordinated by us. It is also a pretty good illustration of the argument being made in the docket: once standardized government data exists, people find uses for it well beyond the agency that collects it.
The state backstop
There is one more complication for anyone hoping rescission will put demographic reporting behind us: states have noticed.
Illinois already has its own workforce demographic reporting requirements. And, effective June 30, the state removed references to the EEOC and federal EEO-1 filing requirement from its Equal Pay Act, giving the job categories their own statutory definitions instead.
In other words, Illinois has already started designing around the possibility that the federal form disappears.
Colorado is being even more explicit. HB 26-1207, signed June 4, requires certain private employers with at least 100 workers to submit EEO-1-style demographic data to the Secretary of State beginning July 1, 2027. The statute specifically says the requirement survives even if the EEOC eliminates federal reporting, and freezes the required format to the federal EEO-1 as it existed on March 1, 2026.
Colorado also routed the requirement through its business-filing system rather than a civil rights agency and did not provide confidentiality protections comparable to the federal EEO-1 regime. Exactly how publicly accessible the filings will be remains an implementation question.
So the practical result of federal rescission may not be that demographic reporting disappears.
It may be that one standardized, confidential national reporting regime is gradually replaced by a state-by-state patchwork with different scopes, timelines, definitions and disclosure rules.
There is probably a German word for reducing regulatory burden by replacing one federal filing requirement with several different state filing requirements.
That fragmentation is precisely what several investor letters warned about.
What happens next
Formally, not much is scheduled. The Commission held its hearing on August 11, the comment window closed on August 24, and there is no announced timeline for a final rule.
A comment count isn’t a referendum, and a lopsided one doesn’t settle an administrative rulemaking. That’s why the 118 substantive organizational letters are more interesting than the 2,580-comment headline.
They show a disagreement that goes well beyond paperwork.
One side sees EEO-1 as infrastructure for identifying discrimination. The other sees the same infrastructure as facilitating disparate-impact litigation and race-conscious employment practices.
And somewhere in the middle is a surprisingly common position: keep measuring race and sex. Just keep the results private.
For investors, researchers and anyone else who depends on comparable workforce data, that distinction matters quite a bit.
We now have the full docket structured — every comment, every attachment, the organizations behind them and the arguments they made. If there’s enough interest, we’ll turn it into a public tracker and make more of the underlying analysis searchable. For now, if there’s something in the docket you’d like us to dig into, let us know.
And next week, we’ll publish our 2026 Human Capital Reporting Trends Report, covering roughly 3,000 companies and five years of history.
And EEO-1 is only one piece of the broader disclosure retreat we’ve been tracking. We’ve tracked what companies are reporting across workforce demographics, employee development, pay equity, board composition and more — and where disclosure has retreated over the past two years.
The report and underlying data will be free. If you’re not already on the list, sign up to get it when it publishes.
→ Get the Report + Data Pack as soon as they’re published
And speaking of the EEOC wanting workforce information when it wants workforce information…EEOC Flexes Its Subpoena Power With Corporate Diversity Probes.
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