Gutting OFCCP and Weakening Anti-Discrimination Enforcement at the DOL
Project 2025 calls for rescinding Executive Order 11246, eliminating the OFCCP, restricting Bostock v. Clayton County to hiring/firing only, and withdrawing guidance on LGBTQ+ protections. The Trump administration has already taken steps toward some of these goals—revoking EO 11246 via Executive Order 14173 in January 2025 and beginning to dismantle OFCCP—while other elements, such as restricting Bostock's scope, remain proposals that would require additional action.
In January 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14173, revoking Executive Order 11246 and eliminating affirmative action obligations for federal contractors. The Department of Labor followed with a proposed rule on July 1, 2025, to rescind the implementing regulations. This dismantles a decades-old tool that required federal contractors to take proactive steps to hire and promote women and people of color—not just avoid discrimination, but actively correct historic exclusion. The OFCCP, the agency that enforced these rules, has been effectively neutered, leaving workers with fewer pathways to challenge systemic bias in contracting, a sector that employs one in five U.S. workers.
Project 2025 also targets LGBTQ+ protections. It proposes to restrict the Supreme Court's 2020 Bostock decision—which held that firing someone for being gay or transgender is sex discrimination under Title VII—to hiring and firing only, excluding bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes. It calls for withdrawing guidance that applied Bostock broadly and rescinding regulations that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, or sex characteristics. As of this writing, these specific restrictions have not been implemented, but the administration has already issued executive orders attacking DEI programs and data collection on transgender people, signaling the direction. If enacted, these changes would create a patchwork of protections where workers could be fired for their orientation but legally harassed or segregated on the job—a direct assault on the dignity and safety that Title VII was meant to guarantee.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Rescind EO 14173 and reinstate EO 11246 A new administration issues an executive order revoking EO 14173 and restoring the full affirmative action framework of EO 11246, including renewed OFCCP enforcement.
- Withdraw proposed rescission rule and reissue EO 11246 regulations DOL withdraws the July 2025 proposed rule and issues a new rule reinstating the implementing regulations for EO 11246, or Congress uses the Congressional Review Act to disapprove the rule if finalized.
- Issue executive order affirming broad application of Bostock The President directs agencies to apply Bostock v. Clayton County to all aspects of employment, not just hiring/firing, and to restore guidance and regulations protecting LGBTQ+ workers.
- Rescind any executive orders restricting DEI and gender-identity data A new administration rescinds EO 14168 and any similar directives, restoring data collection and public-facing materials related to transgender people and DEI.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 18: Department of Labor (pp 617-619)"— 584 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise grown, often making OFCCP’s authority redundant and imposing a second regulatory agency under whose rules businesses must operate. In addition, under EO 11246, the President and DOL can force a huge swath of American employers to comply with rules and regulations based on novel anti- discrimination theories (such as sexual orientation and gender identity theories) that Congress had never imposed by statute. l Rescind EO 11246. The President should eliminate OFCCP by simply rescinding EO 11246. Federal contractors would still be bound by statutory nondiscrimination law but would no longer work under overlapping regimes. (Contractors’ residual obligations under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act and Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA) could be enforced by EEOC or DOL.) Contractors also would be less subject to the changing political whims of a President that might impose significant new costs or burdens on the contractors. Sex Discrimination. The Biden Administration, LGBT advocates, and some federal courts have attempted to expand the scope and definition of sex discrimi- nation, based …"