The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has released its plans for revising, rescinding, and enacting regulations over the coming year, and the list is significant.
The agency identified ten actions it intends to pursue, including proposals to rescind the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, eliminate the annual EEO-1 report, and withdraw long-standing interpretive guidance on affirmative action and national origin discrimination.
The EEOC’s regulatory agenda, submitted through the federal Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, represents a statement of the agency’s intent but does not constitute a change in existing law.
The first concrete action has already occurred, with the rescission of the 1979 affirmative action guidelines published as a final interpretive rule in the Federal Register on July 6, 2026.
Most of the agenda, including the more consequential proposals for employers, has not yet been issued, and several items must still go through notice and comment before they take effect.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains unchanged, and every rescission on the agenda withdraws an agency guideline or report rather than altering the underlying statute.
The two most consequential items for workforce analytics concern the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, which are proceeding on separate regulatory tracks at different stages of development.
One proposal would rescind the interpretive rulemaking portions of the guidelines, while a separate proposal would rescind the associated recordkeeping requirements, which is only at the proposed stage and must still go through notice and comment.
Even if both proposals are finalised, the statutory disparate-impact framework established by the 1991 Civil Rights Act remains in place, meaning employer exposure from private plaintiffs and state regulators persists.
A further proposal would rescind the EEO-1 and its companion reports, with the EEOC citing an estimated 5.2 million reporting hours and roughly $273 million in annual employer costs from its May 2023 Paperwork Reduction Act notice.
Employers should not assume current EEO-1 reporting obligations have changed until the EEOC takes further formal action, as rescinding the report does not eliminate the separate duty to collect and maintain applicant and workforce data.
Three items on the agenda withdraw older interpretive guidance, including the 1980 national origin guidelines, whose rescission is grounded in the statutory disparate-impact framework that survives all of the proposed changes.
A separate proposal would revise the EEOC’s Pregnant Workers Fairness Act regulations, with a notice of proposed rulemaking projected for November 2026 and comments due in January 2027.
State and local law presents a significant parallel risk, as a growing number of jurisdictions are expanding pay-data reporting, mandating bias audits for automated hiring tools, and applying their own disparate-impact standards through active enforcement.
Legal analysis from Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak and Stewart warns that an employer reading the federal rollback as a general green light may step directly into state and local exposure that the federal changes do nothing to reduce.
The firm advises that employers may wish to continue collecting and analysing workforce data under attorney-client privilege, retain validation and workforce records, and track effective dates rather than the aspirational dates listed in the agenda.
The recurring theme across all ten items, as the analysis makes clear, is that a plan to regulate is not a regulation, and obligations change only when a final rule is published with an effective date.