On January 22, 2026, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted to rescind its Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace. The proposal to rescind the guidance was approved two-to-one, with Chair Andrea Lucas (R) and Commissioner Britanny Panuccio (R) voting to repeal the document, and Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal (D) voting against rescission. The rescission is unsurprising now that the Commission has a quorum. Almost immediately after assuming her role as then-acting chair in January 2025, now-Chair Lucas signaled her opposition to portions of the guidance and indicated that she would seek to rescind or revise it as soon as she had the votes to do so.

While the rescission is effective immediately, as a legal matter, the repeal of non-binding EEOC guidance does not dramatically alter federal anti-harassment law, nor does it bear on state civil rights laws that prohibit workplace harassment.

History of Harassment Enforcement Guidance

In 2015, the EEOC established a Select Task Force on Harassment in the Workforce; in 2016, the Task Force released its co-chairs’ report, which set forth its findings and concluded with a series of “promising practices” for eliminating harassment on all prohibited bases in the workforce. The agency later published for public comment a revised draft Enforcement Guidance, but that draft was never formally approved or finalized.

In September 2023, the agency again published proposed Enforcement Guidance; that document was...

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