By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump has fired at least two Democratic members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal laws banning workplace discrimination, in an unprecedented move likely to spur legal challenges.
EEOC Commissioners Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows said Trump, a Republican, removed them from their posts late on Monday. Trump also fired the agency’s general counsel, Karla Gilbride.
A White House official said the fired commissioners “were far-left appointees with radical records of upending longstanding labor law.”
“They have no place as senior appointees in the Trump administration, which was given a mandate by the American people to undo the radical policies they created,” the official said.
It was not immediately clear if Trump had removed the third Democratic appointee at the agency, Kalpana Kotagal. Trump named Andrea Lucas, the EEOC’s lone Republican appointee, as its acting chair last week.
The five-member commission already had a vacancy, so firing Samuels and Burrows leaves it without a quorum of three commissioners. That means the remaining members cannot adopt rules and legal guidance, direct staff to take certain actions, and issue rulings in discrimination cases brought by federal employees.
Trump has similarly gutted the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces workers’ rights to organize and join unions, by firing its general counsel and a Democratic member and leaving the agency unable to issue rulings in hundreds of pending cases.
In separate statements on Tuesday, Burrows and Samuels said they were considering their legal options. Samuels’ term was set to expire in July 2026 and Burrows’ term two years later.
The firings “will undermine the efforts of this independent agency to do the important work of protecting employees from discrimination, supporting employers’ compliance efforts, and expanding public awareness and understanding of federal employment laws,” Burrows said.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York and Andrea Shalal in Washington; Editing by Chris Reese, Alexia Garamfalvi and Nia Williams)
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