White House fires Trump EEOC official after she refuses to step down

The move was quickly denounced by Republican EEOC Commissioner Andrea R. Lucas, who was appointed by former president Donald Trump last year.

“I find the action taken today by the White House against our independent agency to be deeply troubling,” she said in a tweet, calling it an “injection of partisanship where it had been absent.”

The EEOC investigates workplace complaints on sensitive issues like discrimination based on race and gender, which had become deeply politicized during the heated culture wars fanned by the Trump presidency.

The Trump administration sought to narrow civil rights protections for LGBTQ people by urging courts to overturn the EEOC interpretation, developed during the Obama administration, that discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation and gender identity ran afoul of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Gustafson was confirmed by the Senate to a four-year position in August 2019. She had raised the hackles of civil rights, LGBTQ and women’s groups during her confirmation hearing, by what they saw as “evasive” answers she gave about the rights of LGBTQ workers.

“Her evasiveness suggests that she is unwilling or reluctant to preserve the EEOC’s critical mission of defending LGBT people’s well-established legal rights, and her refusal to commit to enforcing the law or recognize legal rights that protect the livelihood of millions of Americans is cause for significant concern,” several human rights advocates wrote in a 2018 letter to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the then-chair of the committee that deals with labor issues, and ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.)

While on the commission, Gustafson had been involved with anti-religious discrimination work.

“One of the issues she made as her hallmark, was the issue of discrimination against religious minorities, the law requiring religious accommodation of beliefs,” said David Lopez, who preceded Gustafson as general counsel under President Barack Obama. “Some lawyers from the conservative Christian right view this right as a conflict with requiring nondiscrimination against LGBTQ people.”

In an email, Gustafson said that her work on religious anti-discrimination did not conflict with LGBTQ rights.

“An employee has the right to be free from discrimination based on his or her religious faith, including beliefs, observances, and practices, which an employer must accommodate unless such accommodation causes undue hardship to the employer. At the same time, an employee has the right to be free from discrimination based on his or her sex, including sexual orientation and transgender status,” she said. “In the statutes enforced by the EEOC, none of these rights supercedes the other, and these rights generally do not conflict. On those exceptional occasions where workplace rights may be in tension with each other, the EEOC should lead the way in thinking through legally-appropriate resolutions. Resolving tensions or conflicts is one of the purposes of law. This is nothing new.”

The EEOC and the White House did not return requests for comment. The White House request for her dismissal was first reported by Bloomberg News.

Lopez…