Trump moves to scrap decades-old anti-discrimination enforcement rules

Federal civil-rights enforcement has begun pulling away from cases built on disparate impact, with the Justice Department backing out of an Atlanta bank agreement and the Education Department ending a South Dakota school deal as the Trump administration moves to erase the legal theory behind them. In practice, that shifts more of the burden onto workers, students, tenants and borrowers to prove discrimination without the federal government using statistical disparities as a basis to act.

Trump signed Executive Order 14281, “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” on April 23, 2025, directing federal agencies to eliminate disparate-impact liability to the maximum degree possible. The doctrine dates to Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971, when the Supreme Court recognized that neutral rules can still discriminate if they disproportionately harm protected groups, and Congress later codified disparate-impact protections in Title VII in 1991.

The rollback has already reached specific cases. The Justice Department withdrew from an agreement involving an Atlanta bank accused of discouraging Black and Latino homebuyers from applying for loans. The Education Department ended an agreement with a South Dakota school district over higher discipline rates for Native American students. Federal prosecutors also dropped several police-reform agreements, including one tied to Minneapolis after George Floyd’s killing in 2020.

The administration has moved beyond individual settlements. It told the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department to review investigations and lawsuits relying on disparate-impact claims within 45 days and take appropriate action. The Justice Department later said it was reviewing its entire docket and had already dismissed or terminated many cases it considered “legally unsupportable” and products of Biden-era “weaponization.”

Those changes have been reinforced by personnel shifts at the top of the civil-rights apparatus. Trump named Andrea R. Lucas acting EEOC chair on January 20, 2025, and later confirmed her for a term that runs until July 1, 2030. Harmeet Dhillon was sworn in as assistant attorney general for civil rights on April 7, 2025, and on June 9, 2026, the Civil Rights Division issued an opinion saying EEOC disparate-impact guidelines are unconstitutional.

At the Education Department, the enforcement retreat has been sharpened by staffing cuts. Roughly 240 staffers were cut from the Office for Civil Rights, nearly half its workforce, and seven of its 12 regional offices were entirely laid off. That has left thousands of complaints in limbo and raised the prospect that families will wait years for resolutions once handled by federal investigators.

Civil-rights groups including the Legal Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union say the shift will make it harder to prove systemic discrimination in housing, jobs and education. The administration says it is restoring equal treatment under the law and narrowing enforcement to intentional discrimination, a change that is already reshaping who can get federal help when bias is hidden inside neutral rules.