On January 22, 2026, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) voted 2-1—under highly unusual circumstances—to eliminate its 2024 Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace, a more than 200-page document interpreting what constitutes workplace harassment under federal law.
The EEOC’s action represents a political rollback by the Trump administration, but its impact reaches beyond the current political moment. The rescission also weakens interpretive coherence in a complex area of law that requires more clarity, not less.
So what does this retraction mean in practice? And how should employers, employees, and practitioners navigate the resulting uncertainty?
What Was in the Harassment Guidance?
For decades, employment attorneys, employers, and employees have relied on EEOC guidance to make sense of broad and often unclear statutory terms like “hostile work environment,” “severe or pervasive,” and “terms and conditions of employment.” But once the recent guidance was rescinded, a shared interpretive lens around workplace harassment was withdrawn without replacement, leaving stakeholders to navigate a terrain shaped more by ideological swings than consistent legal principles.
The 2024 guidance did not create new rights for employees, but rather reflected the EEOC’s effort to interpret existing law, for example, the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. That case held that discrimination “because of sex” includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
The 2024 guidance also compiled dozens of practical examples illustrating how harassment unfolds. The document essentially served as a sort of handbook for employers on how the law applies to real-world scenarios, what constitutes harassment and what does not, and how workplaces can both prevent liability and protect workers.
For example, the guidance indicated that consistent, intentional misgendering of a trans colleague by using the wrong pronouns could constitute workplace harassment, as could preventing employees from using the bathroom consistent with their gender identity. The current EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas is on record saying she believes that these sorts of activities do not constitute harassment in the workplace. Not long after the EEOC reached a voting quorum, and with Lucas at its helm, the commissioners finally voted to officially rescind the harassment guidance.
The EEOC Leaves Workplaces Without Clarity
EEO Leaders, a group of former EEOC and U.S. Department of Labor officials, warned in a letter issued on January 6, 2026 that scrapping the guidance deprives employees and employers of any guidance on how to “identify, preempt, and remedy harassment” on the basis of LGBTQ+ status, but also any other protected status. Without interpretive clarity, harassment cases are harder to identify early and resolve internally, and are more likely to result in expensive litigation.
Dissenting EEOC Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal noted that rather than surgically removing provisions they disagreed with, the majority chose to “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” That blunt approach highlights a deeper issue: when civil rights enforcement turns on political preferences rather than established legal precedent, the people caught in the middle—including frontline HR professionals, managers, and employees experiencing harassment—are left adrift.
A Highly Unusual Retraction
The harassment guidance underwent a robust approval process, which included tens of thousands of public comments, before it became official in 2024. Under the current administration, however, the guidance was not just revised but was eliminated altogether, without the notice-and-comment process required by the Administrative Procedure Act.
The administration’s unusual methods of rescinding the guidance raise multiple red flags. Without going through the standard notice-and-comment process, there is a question of whether the rescission process was even lawful in the first place.
Further, even when the EEOC altered its guidance in the past to more closely mirror the legal philosophy of the sitting administration, it did so in a more nuanced and less sweeping way, rather than completely eviscerating hundreds of pages of guidance with no replacement.
How Can Employers Ensure Harassment-Free Workplaces Without a Roadmap?
For employers, the takeaway should certainly not be that harassment is now lawful. Title VII’s prohibitions remain in force, and courts still interpret hostile work environment standards based on decades of precedent. Further, the Bostock decision is still good law, meaning discrimination, harassment, and retaliation at work on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity remains illegal.
It is likely that litigators will work to fill the void left by the guidance rescission. They may press courts to define unclear boundaries, such as whether name and pronoun misuse, denial of access to facilities, or other conduct tied to gender identity can still constitute actionable harassment, without the EEOC’s voice in the room. Costly litigation could therefore soon replace more accessible solutions that had once been contained in the guidance.
Given the current trajectory, employers and employment attorneys need strategies that do not depend on federal guidance that may vanish with political shifts. The following are considerations for employers navigating the current landscape:
- Treat statutory obligations as the baseline, not guidance documents. Without agency examples, statutory text and judicial precedent carry more weight than ever.
- Lean on state law. Many states have employment protections that reflect those found in Title VII or are even more expansive. In Illinois, workplace harassment policies should be aligned with the definitions and obligations contained in the Illinois Human Rights Act (IHRA), which is broader than Title VII, and thus would ensure employers are in compliance with federal law.
- Invest in rigorous, scenario-based training. This training should discuss real factual scenarios, examining power dynamics and bystander intervention.
- Review and reinforce policies. Clear and easily understood anti-harassment policies, as well as complaint and investigation policies and protocols, should be easily accessible to workers and reiterated at regular intervals. In the absence of clear federal guidance, the strength of an employer’s internal processes becomes a primary line of defense. Moreover, organizations are able to enforce anti-harassment policies that go beyond the minimums required by law.
The Bottom Line
The EEOC’s decision to rescind its harassment guidance reflects a retreat from explaining how the agency understands and applies civil rights laws in practice. When the federal agency charged with enforcing Title VII declines to articulate its own views, employers, employees, and their legal counsel are left without clear benchmarks for compliance or enforcement. In such an environment, practitioners can still rely on the stability of state law, sound legal fundamentals at the statutory level, and thoughtful internal training and policies to chart a path forward in a time of uncertainty.