Comment from OLIVER, JULIE EEOC-2026-0034

I'm writing to oppose the EEOC's proposal to rescind the EEO-1 through EEO-6 reporting and recordkeeping requirements under 29 CFR Part 1602. I understand the Commission's concerns about cost and about avoiding anything that could run afoul of equal protection law, but I don't think this proposal holds up, and I think its real effect would be to take away one of the only tools the government has for noticing patterns of discrimination before they turn into years of harm. The Commission argues that collecting aggregate, self-identified demographic counts amounts to a government racial classification subject to strict scrutiny. I think that reads equal protection doctrine further than courts have actually taken it. Strict scrutiny has applied to government action that classifies individuals in order to give or withhold something based on race, not to the routine collection of aggregate statistics. No employee gains or loses anything because of what shows up in an aggregate EEO-1 filing. I'd also push back on the idea that charge-based investigations are a sufficient substitute. An individual charge tells you about one dispute. It can't reveal a company-wide pattern, like pay gaps concentrated by sex or hiring practices that quietly screen out older applicants, because no single charging party can see across the whole workforce. Getting rid of the collection doesn't get rid of the underlying practices. It just removes the way anyone finds out about them. Beyond ending the reports, the proposal also strips the recordkeeping that generates this data in the first place. Even if the Commission wanted to reverse course later, those records simply wouldn't exist anymore. That's not a pause. It's a permanent loss of an evidentiary base. I'd ask the Commission to withdraw this proposal, or at minimum preserve EEO-1 collection and its underlying recordkeeping while handling any narrower concerns through the normal renewal process it has used for decades. This is not a small technical rule to me. How the EEOC handles it is something I'll be weighing when I vote. Thank you for the opportunity to comment.