Dismissed EEOC commissioner warns that Trump plans to ‘erase the existence of trans people’

WASHINGTON (AP) — A member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who was abruptly dismissed by President Donald Trump says she believes her firing and the move to reshape the panel that protects workers from discrimination is part of the administration’s “agenda to erase the existence of trans people.”

Jocelyn Samuels, in an interview with The Associated Press, said the actions — aimed at implementing Trump’s crackdown on certain diversity and gender rights policies — are unlawful and indicative of a looming wider rollback of work protections for women and minorities.

“My concern is that the refusal to recognize discrimination against trans people is both a way to scapegoat trans people and inflict immense damage on them,” she said, and “a harbinger of the way that this administration will treat other applications of the law with which it disagrees.”

Along with fellow EEOC commissioner Charlotte Burrows, Samuels was dismissed on Jan. 27, one week after Trump took office. Samuels said her dismissal letter pointed out “my support for what they termed radical Biden administration guidance for DEI initiatives and also mentioned my refusal to defend women against extreme gender ideology. Again, their words, not mine.”

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Samuels was nominated by Trump in 2020 and confirmed by the Senate. She was later reappointed by former President Joe Biden, with her term meant to extend until July 2026. Trump, she said, “found me to be an acceptable nominee for a Democratic seat in 2020. I am now being branded a radical extremist. I think it’s the administration’s perspectives that have changed, not mine.”

The EEOC was created by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a bipartisan five-member panel to protect workers from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability and other protected characteristics. The U.S. president appoints the commissioners and the Senate confirms them, but their terms are staggered and are meant to overlap presidential terms to help ensure the agency’s independence. No more than three of the five commissioners can be from the president’s political party.

The two firings leave the agency with one Republican commissioner, Andrea Lucas, who Trump appointed acting EEOC chair last week; one Democratic commissioner, Kalpana Kotagal; and three vacancies that Trump can fill.

Once a Republican majority on the commission is established, Samuels predicted an immediate rollback of EEOC protections in a way that will essentially greenlight “harassment based on gender identity” in the workplace.

The EEOC investigates and imposes penalties on employers found to have violated laws that protect workers from racial, gender, disability and other forms of discrimination. The agency also writes influential rules and guidelines for how anti-discrimination laws should be implemented, and conducts workplace outreach and training.

In recent years, the agency’s Democratic and Republican commissioners have been sharply divided on many issues. Both Republican commissioners voted against new guidelines last year that misgendering transgender employees, or denying access to a bathroom consistent with their gender identity, would violate anti-discrimination laws.

The commission is required to investigate all claims of workplace harassment or discrimination, and Samuels believes those investigations into cases involving trans people will continue on paper. “But the level of investigation, the resources that the EEOC will put into it and the likelihood that the EEOC would find cause to believe that discrimination had occurred ... will be completely eviscerated,” she said.

The end result, she said, will be “incalculable damage for a vulnerable community.”

She also maintains that her dismissal is unlawful and against the foundational concept of independent agencies such as the EEOC, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Such positions are intentionally designed to overlap presidential administrations and can’t be terminated simply based on political orientation. On the same day Samuels and Burrows were dismissed, Trump also dismissed National Labor Relations Board member Gynne A. Wilcox.

“I am looking at my legal options,” Samuels said. “I believe, based on longstanding Supreme Court precedent, that this is an unlawful termination.”

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Associated Press writers Alexandra Olson and Claire Savage contributed to this report.