Panuccio’s Appointment as Commissioner Secures EEOC Quorum: Key Implications for Employers

Takeaways

• The quorum allows the EEOC to proceed with revising or replacing regulations, guidance documents and the EEOC’s Strategic Enforcement Plan, and also permits the agency to approve certain types of litigation.
• The EEOC, which lacked a quorum since the president removed two commissioners in January, now has a three-person quorum.
• The EEOC likely will eliminate or revise its Workplace Harassment Guidance, EEO-1 reporting requirements, and Final Regulations under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to bring them into alignment with the administration’s directives.

Related links

• Strategic Enforcement Plan Fiscal Years 2024 - 2028
• President Appoints Andrea R. Lucas EEOC Acting Chair
• EEOC to Halt Investigations into Disparate Impact Claims
• Position of Acting Chair Lucas Regarding the Commission’s Final Regulations Implementing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act
• EEOC Issues Final Regulations to Implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act  
• Statement re: Vote on Final Rule to Implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act  

Article

The Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s nominee, Brittany Panuccio, as an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) commissioner on Oct. 7, 2025. Panuccio’s confirmation establishes a Republican majority on the Commission and provides the three-member quorum needed to make significant policy changes in line with the president’s stated priorities.

Following the confirmation, Acting Chair Andrea Lucas stated in a post on X, “Now the agency is empowered to deliver fully on our promise to advance the most significant civil rights agenda in a generation.”

In January, President Trump removed Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows from their commissioner positions, leaving only two members: Kalpana Kotagal, nominated by President Joe Biden in 2023, and Andrea Lucas, the acting chair of the Commission whom Trump initially nominated to the EEOC in his first term. Since then, the EEOC has been operating with only two of its five commissioners, leaving the agency without a quorum.

Although the EEOC did not need a quorum to investigate pending charges, it could not approve certain types of litigation, such as pattern and practice cases and systemic litigation. The EEOC also could not take formal action with respect to official EEOC guidance, regulations, and enforcement plans.

Priorities

Panuccio’s appointment paves the way for the EEOC to make official the unofficial changes the agency has instituted under the new administration. For example, under the Biden Administration, the EEOC approved its Strategic Enforcement Plan (SEP) for Fiscal Years 2024-2028, which included an enhanced focus on combating discrimination against religious minorities, racial or ethnic groups, LGBTQI+ individuals, and pregnant workers. The SEP also explained the Commission’s support of employer efforts to “proactively identify and address barriers to equal employment opportunity, cultivate a diverse pool of qualified workers and foster inclusive workplaces.” Although the current Commission could not modify the SEP in the absence of a quorum, it effectively abandoned the Plan and the Biden Administration’s enforcement priorities.

The current EEOC’s objectives and priorities, as stated in a Jan. 21, 2025, press release issued by the EEOC announcing Lucas’ appointment as acting chair of the Commission, include:

rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination; protecting American workers from anti-American national origin discrimination; defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single sex spaces at work; protecting workers from religious bias and harassment, including antisemitism; and remedying other areas of recent under-enforcement.

Harassment Guidance

With the required quorum, the EEOC likely will move promptly to replace its current harassment guidance issued on April 29, 2024. In the Jan. 20, 2025, Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” President Trump directed the EEOC to rescind all guidance inconsistent with the terms of the Order, including the 2024 harassment guidance.

EEO-1 Reporting

As the EEOC prepares to act with a full quorum, one open question is how the agency will manage the future of workforce data collection. At the center of the conversation is the annual EEO-1 Report. The EEO-1 Report is a collection of employee race, ethnicity, and sex data reported by job category. For years, the EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs used the report to identify potential workplace discrimination trends.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 explicitly called for eliminating EEO-1 reporting, claiming the data can “be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged racial discrimination.” According to a Sept. 15, 2025, internal agency memo obtained by the Associated Press, the EEOC will no longer pursue disparate impact complaints.

The EEOC’s authority to collect workforce demographic data is rooted in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, § 709(c) (42 U.S.C. § 2000e-8(c)), and administrative procedure. Removing the obligation may require the EEOC to engage in new rulemaking to revise or remove current EEOC regulations.

Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

The EEOC published a statement earlier this year communicating Acting Chair Lucas’ intention to reconsider portions of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) Final Regulations (Final Rule). Look for the Commission to remove certain conditions such as menstruation, infertility, menopause, and abortion from the list of conditions that require accommodation.

Acting Chair Lucas has been vocal about her support for the PWFA but has voiced strong disagreement with the Commission’s interpretation in the EEOC’s Final Rule of the phrase “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” According to Acting Chair Lucas:

[T]he PWFA was a tremendous, bipartisan legislative achievement. Pregnant women in the workplace deserve regulations that implement the Act’s provisions in a clear and reliable way. It is unfortunate that the elements of the final rule serving this purpose are inextricably tied to a needlessly expansive foundation that does not.

Lucas explained that this foundation built by the EEOC, the expansive way the Final Rule interprets the phrase pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical condition, arguably requires accommodation of “virtually every condition, circumstance, or procedure that relates to any aspect of the female reproductive system.” In Lucas’ view, the PWFA’s focus is on accommodating the actual pregnancy and childbirth of an individual worker.

Menstruation, infertility, menopause, and the like are not caused or exacerbated by a particular pregnancy or childbirth—but rather the functioning, or ill-functioning, of the female worker’s underlying reproductive system—and so are not subject to accommodation under the PWFA.

The EEOC also is faced with a May 21, 2025, federal court order from the court in the Western District of Louisiana vacating a portion of the EEOC’s Final Rule interpreting the PWFA as requiring employers to accommodate what the court refers to as “elective abortions” and ordering the EEOC to revise the PWFA Final Rule. The EEOC has been unable to revise the rule without a quorum.

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Following a flurry of executive orders signed in the administration’s first days, its next step in reshaping workplace law was to restore a quorum at the EEOC. With Panuccio’s confirmation, the Commission will move swiftly to implement the policy priorities reflected in the president’s orders. These fundamental changes will bring new challenges to employers who must adapt to the new legal landscape.

Please contact a Jackson Lewis attorney for additional guidance on what this development means for your business.