Pursuant to President Trump’s April 23, 2025 Executive Order (EO)“Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission (EEOC) directed all area, local, and district office directors to discharge any complaints based on “disparate impact liability.” Disparate impact liability is a legal concept that argues that even if a policy looks fair on the surface, it can still be discriminatory if it creates unnecessary barriers that make it harder for certain groups of people to succeed. In changing the policy, the EEOC cited language in the April EO arguing that disparate impact has become a “key tool” of a “pernicious movement” that threatens meritocracy in favor of “racial balancing” in the workforce and instructs districts to compile a list of pending disparate impact cases, then close them.
