A UVA alum has been installed by Donald Trump as the acting general counsel at the Equal Opportunity Commission, whose acting chair, Andrea Lucas, has been actively dismantling the agency’s mission for the past two weeks.
Andrew Rogers, a double-‘Hoo – in 2002, he earned his BA in government, foreign affairs and political theory; in 2005, he finished his JD at the UVA School of Law – had served as Lucas’s chief counsel and chief of staff since the last few months of the Trump 1.0 administration, and then when she served as an EEOC commissioner through the Biden years.
Rogers, who needs to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, replaces Biden appointee Karla Gilbride, who was fired last week along with two of the EEOC’s three Democratic commissioners.
The two fired Democrats, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuel, who had been serving five-year terms, are planning to challenge their dismissals in court; in the meantime, the EEOC is currently operating without a quorum, with three of the five seats on the commission left vacant by the firings.
The lack of a quorum should put a legal kibosh on policy changes in the interim, but, no.
Lucas, who also needs to be confirmed by the Senate, has come out of the gate as the acting with guns-a-blazin’, taking aim, at the outset, at what she has termed “the Biden administration’s gender identity agenda,” emphasizing that she will prioritize defending “the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights.”
To that noble end, she’s had the EEOC remove its “pronoun app,” a feature in employees’ Microsoft 365 profiles that allowed an employee to opt to identify pronouns, content which then appeared alongside the employee’s display name across all Microsoft 365 platforms, including Outlook and Teams.
She also ended the use of the “X” gender marker during the intake process for filing a charge of discrimination, and directed the modification of the charge of discrimination and related forms to remove “Mx.” from the list of prefix options.
You know, the important stuff.
“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” Lucas said in a statement attributed to her in an EEOC press release issued last week. “Sex is binary (male and female) and immutable. It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths, or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly.”
It would seem, then, that the job of our UVA alum, Rogers, will be on coming up with creative interpretations of federal civil rights law to aid Lucas in her active efforts to reverse the agency’s course from the Biden years.
I mean, she hasn’t even gotten started on DEI, though she did say, in a statement from the press release announcing her appointment, that “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race … discrimination” would be an obvious priority.
“Our employment civil rights laws are a matter of individual rights. We must reject the twin lies of identity politics: that justice is measured by group outcomes, and that civil rights exist solely to remedy harms against certain groups,” Lucas said.
Woo, boy.
To close the books on this, here’s a statement from Rogers on his appointment:
“I am honored to be selected by the president to serve at the Commission, and to advance robust, high-quality, efficient, and transparent enforcement of our nation’s civil rights laws via the agency’s litigation program.”
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Chris Graham
