Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies · Notable

Restrict Bostock to hiring and firing

Partially done

584 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“Restrict the application of Bostock. The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexual orientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The largest live federal application of Bostock outside hiring and firing was withdrawn. The EEOC "voted 2-1 yesterday to rescind its 'Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace,' … which was originally approved in 2024" (announced 2026-01-23). What the guidance did, on this Quote's terms, is stated in the EEOC's own earlier release: it took "the enforcement position that harassing conduct under Title VII includes 'denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with [an] individual's gender identity'" and "'repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with [an] individual's known gender identity'" — Bostock's reasoning applied to conduct in the workplace beyond the hire-and-fire decisions the Quote would confine it to. Those positions had already been vacated nationwide on 2025-05-15 by a Texas federal court (*Texas, et al. v. EEOC*, 2:24-CV-173 (N.D. Tex.)); the Commission could not act sooner because it lacked a quorum from 2025-01-27. Still `partial`: the restriction is being achieved program by program, the general instrument the order called for does not exist (see the notes), and *Bostock* itself is untouched.

  2. Partially done

    The Department of Labor rescinded its 2022 interpretation of section 188 of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which had construed "because of ... sex" to include gender identity on the strength of Bostock. This is the Department's own first documented confinement of Bostock to Title VII employment, which is as far as the Quote wants it to reach. It is one program, not the general restriction asked for.

  3. Partially done

    The Justice Department confined Bostock in its own position, the first in-window instrument to do so. The Acting Associate Attorney General's memorandum to the Civil Rights Division quotes section 3(f) and states that "it is the position of the Department of Justice that Bostock's holding does not mandate gender identity-based access to single-sex spaces or athletics, nor does it impair Congress's guarantee to women of equal opportunity under Title IX". It withdrew the two Division memoranda that had carried Bostock into Title IX and into the Safe Streets Act, JJDPA, VOCA and VAWA. It is not the guidance to agencies that section 3(f) directs: the memorandum is addressed to one Division, and it says "[t]he Department intends to issue further, more detailed guidance on this issue". It is the Department's own confinement of Bostock outside Title VII employment, so `partial` dates from here, not from the 2026-01-08 DOL notice.

  4. Attempted

    Executive Order 14168 section 3(f) declared the previous administration's reading of Bostock outside Title VII "legally untenable" and directed the Attorney General to "immediately issue guidance to agencies to correct the misapplication of the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) to sex-based distinctions in agency activities." A direction confining Bostock, with nothing yet changed on the ground.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The Quote asks that Bostock be confined to “hiring and firing”. The instruments found confine it to Title VII employment generally rather than to hiring and firing specifically, and reach only the programs each one covers; the Supreme Court’s holding itself is untouched, and only Congress or the Court could narrow it.
  • Leveled together with #1601 (withdraw the notices and guidances) and #1602 (rescind the regulations) on the same printed page. All three run off Executive Order 14168; each carries its own dates and its own object, and none inherits another’s Status.
  • The Attorney General’s guidance called for by section 3(f) does not exist in any allowlisted, readable record, and the negative now has a stated reach. Corrected 2026-09-03: the earlier note said justice.gov/olc/opinions “rejects query strings”. It does not — the full-text search works and it passes a control. Read on 2026-09-03 with the full browser header set, justice.gov/olc/opinions?search_api_fulltext=discrimination returns “19 Results” including opinions issued in 2026, while …=Bostock returns “Your search conditions returned no results”, byte-for-byte the same page the nonsense control …=zzqxwrflub returns. No OLC opinion mentions Bostock. A sweep of DOJ’s own sitemap for read-queue ticket 04 on 2026-09-02 (335,942 URLs across justice.gov/sitemap.xml?page=1..169, which needs the full header set — a bare User-Agent gets an Akamai refusal on every page) found the string bostock once, in the Solicitor General’s 2019 merits brief at justice.gov/osg/brief/bostock-v-clayton-cntyaltitude-express-inc-v-zarda. There is no in-window Attorney General memorandum, guidance document or press release implementing §3(f), and none announcing the §7(c) rescissions. The stated limit (it bit: see the 2026-10-01 correction below): the sitemap indexes HTML pages, not PDFs under /media/, so a memorandum posted only as a PDF with no landing page would not appear. justice.gov/news?search_api_fulltext=… is a JavaScript shell and justice.gov/search?keys=… answers 403; justice.gov/api/v1/press_releases.json returns 271,674 records but accepts no search parameter of any kind, so sweeping it would cost ~1,200 requests.
  • Resolved (review, 2026-10-01): the negative above was wrong, at its stated limit. The section 3(f) direction has a partial answer: the Acting Associate Attorney General’s memorandum of 2025-02-12, posted only as a PDF (justice.gov/crt/media/1389946/dl, read in full 2026-10-01). A PDF with no landing page is exactly the case that bullet said the sitemap could not see. The memorandum states DOJ’s position and withdraws two Division memoranda; it is now the 2025-02-12 event. It is addressed to the Civil Rights Division, not to agencies, and promises “further, more detailed guidance”. Whether that guidance was ever issued is still unknown. One web search limited to justice.gov (2026-10-01) surfaced this memorandum and nothing later. The triage reached this from the 2026-04-30 Task Force release, on a tail row (Bearing 0.09). The negative bullet is left as written and corrected here.
  • The read-queue row that asked for this is answered. What it hoped for — a government-wide implementing action — is a documented absence; what it did not anticipate is that the EEOC half was settled twice, and that is now the second event.
Action
restrict
Object
Application of Bostock v. Clayton County
ID
1600