When just weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, the federal agency charged with safeguarding civil rights in the workplace withdrew from seven cases it had brought related to gender-identity discrimination, Chai Feldblum took note. 

For the last 60 years, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, has investigated and brought cases on behalf of aggrieved workers — at no cost to the workers, and with an eye-popping success rate that is often above 90 percent. 

The cases the EEOC withdrew from included those brought on behalf of an Alabama hospitality group worker who alleged their manager said they needed to be “hidden” on the night shift before firing them outright; a transgender woman at an Illinois hog farm who said her coworker exposed his genitals to her and touched her breasts; and a transgender hotel worker in New York who said their supervisor referred to them as “transformer” and “it.”

“The EEOC was bringing the cases on their behalf, and then the EEOC said: ‘We’re done.’ So the only way those folks could get legal relief was if there were other lawyers who would step up and take their cases,” said Feldblum, a lawyer and longtime activist for disability and LGBTQ+ rights who served as one of the EEOC’s five commissioners during the Obama administration and into the beginning of Trump’s first term. 

Feldblum knew that the rights of the Americans she’d spent her career protecting were at heightened risk when the president kicked off his second term with executive orders titled: “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Feldblum started tracking how the nascent Trump administration was moving to erode the civil rights of queer people. As Pride and other affinity groups began to disband across the federal government following Trump’s first executive orders, Feldblum connected with a fellow EEOC alum and an impacted federal worker. The three of them started putting together Pride in Exile, a nonprofit organization “committed to ensuring equal employment opportunity for LGBTQ+ individuals.” Then, after Trump fired two Democratic EEOC commissioners and its general counsel, and the agency proceeded to drop the seven cases brought by transgender plaintiffs and their workplace allies, Feldblum started to think about what she and other former EEOC leaders could do to record what the agency was — and wasn’t — doing to protect workers’ civil rights.

Feldblum sent some emails and the enthusiastic response led to the first online meeting of what would become a second organization, which they now call EEO Leaders. They meet regularly, on their own time and at their own expense, and maintain an active, encrypted group chat in which they discuss and monitor the actions of the agency at which many of them once served.

“The impetus for the first gathering of this group was to see if we knew lawyers that could help these individuals,” Feldblum said.

“Then, at that first meeting, we realized that apart from what pulled us together in the first place, we could serve a role in monitoring what (then) Acting Chair [Andrea] Lucas was doing. We also realized that there was support in community and by gathering, we were supporting each other,” Feldblum continued.

Trump’s second presidency has been marked by chaos throughout the federal agencies. His administration has fired more than a hundred thousand workers, either in alleged pursuit of greater government efficiency or to install leaders with more like-minded ideologies, and the cuts went beyond the senior-level political appointees who typically turn over at the start of a new administration. Many are contesting their firings in court. 

The early months of Trump’s administration have also involved an unprecedented assault on the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans, specifically transgender people. In addition to his executive order declaring that the government would only recognize two unchangeable sexes, male and female, his administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, threatened to pull funding from public school systems that provide gender-neutral bathrooms, and sought to transfer trans women to men’s prisons. CNN reported last week that Trump’s Justice Department is weighing prohibitions on transgender Americans owning guns. All of these moves have or are likely to face legal challenges.

At the same time, the Trump administration has removed content across the federal government’s websites perceived to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, using broad keyword searches that resulted in datasets related to HIV/AIDS being scrubbed from Centers for Disease Control, and the Pentagon deleting photos and information about the World War Two aircraft the Enola Gay. 

Alums of federal agencies have banded together to preserve the knowledge and history of their former employers. Workers ousted from the nearly dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, have an encrypted group chat. A bipartisan group of former Justice Department officials formed Justice Connection to “protect the Department’s workforce and the rule of law.” But Pride in Exile, and to an even greater extent EEO Leaders, have taken the extra step of providing real-time responses to their former agency’s actions as a form of private-sector oversight.

EEO Leaders’ work is akin to the “shadow cabinet” system in the United Kingdom, wherein opposition party leaders scrutinize and respond to the elected party’s policy actions and offer a counterpoint to the public. Former Rep. Wiley Nickel, a Democrat from North Carolina, urged his party to form a shadow cabinet shortly after Trump’s reelection, writing in the Washington Post that it could be “democracy’s insurance policy.” Historian Timothy Snyder, who authored the Trump resistance Bibles, “On Tyranny” and “On Freedom,” wrote in January that a “shadow cabinet would remind us of how much better things can be.” To avoid any conflation with the “deep state” bogeyman of conservative politics, Snyder floated the idea of using a different term for the practice in the United States.

EEO Leaders see three audiences for their work. The first is employers who, as Feldblum put it, would “still like to do the right thing, who need to know what they are still permitted to do under the law.” For example, the EEOC’s application of Trump’s order on gender identity seemingly counters the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which established that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the same law that created the agency itself — prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. 

“A second audience is people who themselves have experienced discrimination, or might experience discrimination in employment, to let them know what their rights are. And then the third audience is just general people in the public who need to know what is happening to civil rights protections in this country,” Feldblum said. 

EEO Leaders sent a public letter to the EEOC’s Lucas that they had “grave concerns about the letters you recently sent to 20 major law firms” about DEI-related discrimination, concluding: “These letters appear to exceed your authority.” They also weighed in on Lucas’ scrubbing of post-Bostock guidance and reminded the public that her unilateral changes are not official agency policy. 

“We thought there would be real power in collective action and in speaking as a group about the ways in which we think that the anti-discrimination laws should be interpreted and the ways in which the EEOC should be operating as a federal enforcement agency,” said Jocelyn Samuels, a group member and former EEOC commissioner and vice chair who was fired by Trump. 

Samuels noted that EEO Leaders also plan on filing friend-of-the-court briefs in litigation filed by private parties to enforce civil rights laws still on the books — and potentially in cases “in which the EEOC is involved if we believe that the current EEOC is misrepresenting the standards of the law,” she said.

Early actions by EEO Leaders focused on LGBTQ+ workers because they are the group of Americans whose civil rights the EEOC first signaled it will not fight to protect. But EEO Leaders have also weighed in on Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting disparate-impact cases. These types of cases, which are about policies that are seemingly neutral but result in protected classes of workers being treated differently, are often associated with racial discrimination but can also be related to sex, gender and disability. They  are particularly impactful because they can lead to systemic change. 

One example is a case that the EEOC brought in 2009 on behalf of a Muslim American woman who said Abercrombie & Fitch would not hire her because her headscarf violated the clothing retailer’s dress code. The dispute went all the way to the Supreme Court, which established in an 8-1 ruling that civil rights laws protect workers from religion-based discrimination, even if the worker or job applicant does not explicitly ask for an accommodation. 

EEO Leaders have also begun preserving EEOC documents they believe are at risk of disappearing from the agency’s website to ensure they remain available to the public — something that Pride in Exile is also doing on a larger scale in a section of “restored information” about LGBTQ+ Americans from across the federal government. They note that none of the documents are classified and were previously available to the public. They include everything from EEOC case summaries related to gender-identity discrimination to Labor Department guidance related to sex discrimination regulations at federal contractors to bathroom access rights of transgender workers. 

Pride in Exile has also hosted two “know your rights” trainings for LGBTQ+ workers — the first for federal employees and the second, during Pride Month, for all U.S. workers. More are expected. 

Anupa Iyer, a disability-rights lawyer and former Labor Department official, said Pride in Exile began as a lunch check-in between herself and a government worker to see “how they were handling the attack on LGBTQ+ folks in the federal government.” That person had begun printing out materials from the EEOC’s website related to LGBTQ+ rights fearing that at some point, it might disappear. Iyer, who considers herself an LGBTQ+ ally, started a text thread between herself, the worker, and Feldblum, whom she worked with earlier in her career at the EEOC. 

“You gotta use your networks where you can and pay it forward,” Iyer explained. “This individual was sharing how the folks at EEOC Pride had been disbanded because of the disbanding of employee resource groups. That was where we initially started. Then, it was ‘let’s do something’ leveraging the commitment from former senior EEOC officials who really cared about this work and care about supporting civil rights.”

Pride in Exile was born. Then, the same sort of collaborative spirit prompted Feldblum to create the EEO Leaders group.

“That was really the genesis, it was: ‘Let’s find a way to create community and build solidarity in a moment where everything around us, that we’ve all worked so hard for, is falling apart,’” Iyer said.

Charlotte Burrows, an EEO Leaders member who was EEOC chair until Trump fired her in January, said she does not believe that Americans want the Trump administration to dismantle or diminish the agency that has secured landmark civil rights settlements on behalf of workers. 

EEOC cases resulted in Walmart’s $20 million payout in 2020 over a pre-employment physical screening test that unfairly disadvantaged women applicants; the $240 million that now-defunct Henry’s Turkey Service paid in 2013 over supervisors severely abusing men with intellectual disabilities; and the $192.5 million that Coca-Cola paid in 2000 to settle a case brought by Black salaried employees who accused them of discrimination. 

“I feel very powerfully that it’s important to remind people that this agency, which has been around for 60 years, represents the best values of American people, that everybody deserves a fair shake, everybody deserves dignity and respect in the workplace, and I think that truly does reflect what most Americans believe,” Burrows said.