The federal government’s in-house discrimination watchdog wants to tear up the rulebook it has used for years to process complaints from its own workforce. On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted to issue a proposed rule rewriting how federal employees and job applicants report workplace discrimination, and the change would eventually touch a workforce the agency itself describes as roughly 2 million people.
The proposal is not final. It is a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, meaning it lays out what the EEOC wants to do and opens the idea to public comment before anything actually changes. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said the internal complaint process “is supposed to provide a swift, informal path to resolution,” but that “the current system is deeply broken.” For a federal worker weighing whether to report discrimination on the job, the rule would reshape several steps of a process the agency says now routinely drags on for years before either side gets an answer.
The Mandatory Counseling Step the EEOC Wants to Drop
Under the current rules, a federal employee or applicant who believes an agency discriminated against them cannot simply file a complaint. The first required step is contacting an EEO Counselor at the agency, and that contact generally has to happen within 45 days of the alleged discrimination. The counselor then offers either traditional counseling or an alternative dispute resolution track such as mediation. Only after that process ends without a resolution, and only within 15 days of being told how, can the worker file a formal complaint with the agency’s EEO office.
The EEOC’s own numbers are part of why it wants to drop that step. According to the agency’s newsroom announcement, federal agencies conducted an average of 35,618 counseling sessions a year between 2017 and 2021, and only about 385 cases a year settled during that pre-complaint counseling stage. Under the proposed rule, federal employees and applicants would be able to file a complaint directly with their agency, without going through mandatory counseling first.
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A 30-Day Window to Weigh In
The proposed rule published in the Federal Register on August 28, 2026, and the EEOC says the public will have 30 days from that publication date to submit comments once the filing formally posts for comment. That timeline points to a comment window closing on or around September 28, 2026, after which the EEOC has said it will review every comment and any relevant data, consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, before deciding whether to finalize the rule. The agency has also been explicit that the rule, if adopted, would apply only going forward: it would not affect complaints already in the pipeline, and it would not touch how the EEOC handles discrimination complaints in the private sector.
Hearings Would Become the Exception, Not the Rule
Today, once an agency finishes investigating a formal complaint, the worker gets a choice: ask for a hearing before an EEOC administrative judge, or ask the agency to issue a final decision without one. A hearing request currently has to go in within 30 days of receiving that notice, and if granted, an administrative judge holds the hearing, issues a decision, and can order relief if discrimination is found. The proposed rule would narrow that path. Instead of hearings being available on request in essentially every case, the EEOC describes “tailored hearings” that would happen only for cases the agency identifies for what it calls targeted referral, rather than automatically for every complaint that reaches that stage.
Class Complaints Would Move to Federal Court
The proposal also takes aim at group, or “class,” complaints. The EEOC’s announcement puts it plainly: despite being responsible for a 2 million-person federal workforce, the agency describes itself as too small to be well suited to handling large class complaints through its own administrative process. Under the proposed rule, class actions would instead be handled by federal courts. Federal employees and applicants would still be able to use the EEOC’s process to start those claims and to have related individual complaints handled together, but the class litigation itself would shift out of the agency’s administrative system and into court.
Clearer Standards for Mixed and Overlapping Complaints
The federal sector also has a category of case that trips up workers under the current rules: complaints where a discrimination claim overlaps with a separate personnel matter, which the EEOC describes as “mixed-complaints unique to the federal sector.” According to the agency’s announcement, the proposed rule would clarify how a complaint should be presented in the first place and how these overlapping, mixed-issue cases get handled procedurally, rather than leaving workers to guess which process governs which part of their claim. The stated goal, consistent with the rest of the package, is fewer procedural dead ends that leave a complaint stuck rather than resolved.
Attorney Fees and New Transparency Rules Under the Cummings Act
Two other pieces round out the proposal. The rule would update the standards governing when and how attorney’s fees are awarded in the federal EEO process, including how the EEOC determines market rates for attorney work. Separately, the proposal is meant to fully implement the Cummings Act, a law Congress passed in 2020, by requiring the EEOC to post more information online about complaint outcomes and disciplinary actions, and by ensuring that the person who runs each federal agency’s EEO program operates independently. The EEOC has said the rule would leave several core rights untouched regardless of the outcome: the right to file a complaint, to pursue alternative dispute resolution, to receive a final agency decision, to appeal to the EEOC for a fresh “de novo” review, and to eventually take a case to federal court.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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