President Donald Trump has nominated a Justice Department official to an open seat on a key civil rights agency, signaling his administration’s determination to forge ahead with efforts to dismantle diversity policies it claims discriminate against white workers and others.
The Trump administration has yet to nominate anyone to fill a fifth seat, left open by the firing of Democrat Charlotte Burrows. The White House announced late Monday that it has tapped Matt Zandi to fill a seat previously held by Jocelyn Samuels, one of two Democratic commissioners fired by Trump before the end of their terms in an unprecedented move to seize control of the EEOC, a bipartisan agency created by Congress through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Zandi’s nomination comes as the EEOC prepares for several major regulatory changes, including ending a 60-year-old requirement to collect demographic workforce data from many employers and revising rules for enforcing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which Lucas has said improperly extended protections for workers seeking abortions, birth control or fertility treatments.
“Under this administration, EEOC has sharpened its focus on even-handed enforcement of employment discrimination laws,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, said during the hearing on Eschbach, whom he praised.
“For a bipartisan commission, the custom is to pair nominees from the two parties.
This would be the third Republican commissioner in a row without a pairing, an overtly partisan decision of the administration,” Baldwin said Tuesday, speaking during a Senate committee hearing on the confirmation of Catherine Eschbach to be EEOC general counsel.
