Senate confirmation of Trump nominee cements his shake-up of top civil rights agency

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The Senate confirmed President Donald Trump's pick to fill a critical vacancy at the top agency for worker rights, restoring it to the full power needed to deepen his overhaul of civil rights enforcement.

The confirmation of Brittany Panuccio as a commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Tuesday established a Republican majority at the agency and restored the quorum needed to make major policy and enforcement decisions in pursuit of Trump's civil rights priorities, including stamping out diversity and inclusion programs and rolling back protections for transgender workers.

The Senate voted 51-47 along party lines to confirm Panuccio and more than 100 other Trump nominees under rules adopted by Republicans to make it easier to confirm large groups of lower-level, non-judicial nominations.

Leading Democratic senators have said they won’t confirm Trump’s nominees to the EEOC unless he reverses his unprecedented firing in January of two Democratic commissioners before their terms were up, saying the move stripped the agency of its historic bipartisanship and independence.

Their dismissals removed a key obstacle to implementing Trump's civil rights agenda but also temporarily left the commission without the quorum required to bring some major lawsuits, revise regulations for implementing laws and take other decisions.

Republican senators have welcomed the prospect that the EEOC will rescind certain policies on DEI, gender-identity and abortion that they argued overstepped the agency's authority.

Acting EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, who was confirmed to a second term as commissioner in July, has taken key steps to fulfill a slew of Trump's executive orders on civil rights.

The EEOC has dropped lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers and subjected incoming complaints related to gender identity to heightened scrutiny. The agency also stopped investigating complaints based on “ disparate impact liability, ” an established concept in U.S. civil rights law designed to root out certain practices that disadvantage minorities, women, people with disabilities, older adults, and others. Lucas leveraged the EEOC to help the Trump administration target private institutions over their DEI programs.

The EEOC, which investigates employment discrimination in the private sector, was created by Congress under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The president appoints its five commissioners and the Senate confirms them, but their terms are meant to be staggered and overlap presidential terms.

Panuccio was nominated to replace Republican Keith Sonderling, who left the EEOC in 2024 and is now deputy labor secretary. The EEOC now has three commissioners, including Democrat Kalpana Kotagal. Trump has yet to announce nominations for the two remaining vacancies. Meanwhile, one of the two Democratic commissioners he fired, Jocelyn Samuels, has filed a lawsuit demanding to be reinstated.

At their Senate hearings, both Lucas and Panuccio vehemently maintained that the EEOC should not be considered an independency agency.

Panuccio, who worked at the Department of Education during the first Trump administration, was most recently a Florida assistant U.S. attorney. During her hearing she said was passionate about defending women’s rights and advocating for the rights of disabled workers, sharing her own past as a rape victim and a childhood diagnosis of juvenile idiopathic arthritis.

But during an exchange with Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Panuccio refused to rule out the possibility that the EEOC would obey a hypothetical order from Trump to stop investigating sex-based discrimination charges on behalf of women, answering that that “the EEOC as an executive branch agency does respond to the President as the head of the executive branch.”

While the EEOC has continued bringing lawsuits and settling complaints on behalf of women, Democrats and civil rights groups say the EEOC has set a dangerous precedent of halting investigations into entire categories of discrimination to comply with presidential orders.

Panuccio’s confirmation “cements a Trump takeover of the EEOC that will mean the end of critical protections against workplace harassment and discrimination,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state said in a statement.

With quorum reestablished, the EEOC is likely to revise its guidance on workplace harassment, which the agency updated last year for the first time in 25 years to strengthen protections for LGBTQ workers, including the right to use bathrooms and be addressed by pronouns consistent with their gender identity. A Texas federal judge struck down those provisions in May but the EEOC has been unable to formally rewrite the guidance without quorum.

Another looming flashpoint involves EEOC regulations on the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a 2020 law that strengthened the rights of pregnant workers to receive accommodations such as time off for medical appointments. Republican-led states and religious groups have successfully challenged the EEOC regulations in court for including abortion as a pregnancy-related condition.

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