Education Department targets pregnant, LGBTQ staff protections

The US Department of Education is pushing to strip workplace protections for pregnant or LGBTQ staff, telling its employee union the policies must be changed to conform to President Donald Trump’s executive order on “defending women from gender ideology extremism.”

In a May 9 email viewed by Bloomberg News, the agency invited the union to negotiate over “required changes” to the rules and shared a spreadsheet listing  dozens of specific union contract provisions and human resources policies targeted for revisions. 

It proposed that the word “pregnancy” be removed from several clauses, including one specifying types of discrimination that are prohibited in granting promotions. It said rules prohibiting discrimination when disciplining employees or choosing participants for career development programs should be amended to remove mention of sexual orientation, and said “sexual orientation and gender identity” should be struck from a list of characteristics that could not be used to exclude workers from the department’s student loan repayment program.

The entry on the agency’s anti-harassment policy called for removing a reference to “sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy.” The spreadsheet also listed several policies where it said to remove the word “diversity,” replace the singular “they” with “he or she,” or replace “gender” with “sex.”

The Education Department “is implementing President Trump’s Executive Order on Defending Women in accordance with all applicable federal requirements, including the Federal Labor-Management Relations Statute, to ensure policies remain consistent with law and government-wide guidance,” agency spokesperson Madi Biedermann said in an emailed statement. The executive order, signed on Inauguration Day, directs agencies to remove any policies that “inculcate gender ideology.”

The Education Department’s union, a chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, rejected the agency’s efforts to change its contract, which took effect shortly before Trump took office and is slated to last through the end of his term. “The agency does not have the legal authority to reopen, modify, revise, alter, and/or change” the contract, local AFGE president Sheria Smith wrote in a May 16 email responding to the agency’s message. She said the union would not agree to voluntarily renegotiate its agreements to conform with Trump’s “Defending Women” order, and “will initiate litigation as necessary and proper” if the agency tries to change rules unilaterally.  

“The executive order does not trump our contract, and they know that,” Smith said in an interview. 

Smith, a lawyer in the department’s civil rights office whose job was included in a layoff currently blocked in court, characterized the department’s push for language revisions as an effort to curb workplace rights — including those of pregnant employees — under the guise of protecting women.

The message to the union did not offer detailed rationales for proposed changes like excising language about pregnancy, but did say the changes would “align the scope of sex-based discrimination to Title VII” of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that anti-gay and anti-transgender discrimination are in fact among the types of sex bias prohibited by the 1964 law, with Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch writing the opinion for the 6-3 majority.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com