'Unlawful DEI-motivated' workplace discrimination to be rooted out by Trump's new acting EEOC chair
President Donald Trump's pick to serve as acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) vowed to make rooting out illegal DEI practices in the workplace a priority, she said.
"Consistent with the President’s Executive Orders and priorities, my priorities will 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," Andrea Lucas said in a press release provided to Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
Lucas was appointed to the EEOC as a commissioner in 2020 under the first Trump administration and has served in the role since. The EEOC is the federal government's only agency authorized to investigate and sue private companies and employers over employment discrimination.
"I am honored to be chosen by President Trump to lead the EEOC, our nation’s premier civil rights agency enforcing federal employment anti-discrimination laws," Lucas said of her appointment. "I look forward to restoring evenhanded enforcement of employment civil rights laws for all Americans. In recent years, this agency has remained silent in the face of multiple forms of widespread, overt discrimination."
Trump signed a bevy of executive actions and orders on Monday after he was sworn in as the nation's 47th president, including ones related to diversity, equity and inclusion, better known as DEI programs.
"The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military," Trump's executive order on ending "radical and wasteful" DEI programs states. "This was a concerted effort stemming from President Biden’s first day in office."
"That ends today," the executive order reads. "Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great."
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Lucas echoed Trump's views on DEI programs within the federal government and beyond in her statement Tuesday, championing that the nation "must reject the twin lies of identity politics."
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"Our employment civil rights laws are a matter of individual rights," Lucas said. "We must reject the twin lies of identity politics: that justice is measured by group outcomes and that civil rights exist solely to remedy harms against certain groups."
"I intend to dispel the notion that only the ‘right sort of’ charging party is welcome through our doors and to reinforce instead the fundamental belief enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and our civil rights laws—that all people are ‘created equal.’ I am committed to ensuring equal justice under the law and to focusing on equal opportunity, merit, and colorblind equality."