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

18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies · Notable

Withdraw agency notices and guidances applying Bostock broadly

Partially done

584 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“Withdraw unlawful “notices” and “guidances.” The President should direct agencies to withdraw unlawful “notices” and “guidances” purporting to apply Bostock’s reasoning broadly outside hiring and firing.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    A second document from the class section 7(c) names by name was withdrawn: the EEOC "voted 2-1 yesterday to rescind its 'Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace,' … which was originally approved in 2024" (announced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). That guidance is the eleventh of the eleven documents listed in the order, and the one whose fate the earlier note said it could not establish. Its canonical URL, `eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-harassment-workplace`, now returns HTTP 404. The twenty months between the direction and the vote are explained by the EEOC's own release of 2025-05-20: EO 14168 "directed the EEOC to rescind portions of the guidance … However, any modification or rescission must be approved by a majority vote of the Commission, and as of January 27, 2025, the EEOC lacks a quorum." In the interval a court reached the same object by a different route — on 2025-05-15 a Texas federal court held the expansion of the definition of "sex" in the guidance contrary to law (*Texas, et al. v. EEOC*, 2:24-CV-173 (N.D. Tex.)) and "vacated portions of the guidance nationwide", after which the EEOC "labeled and shaded the vacated portions of the guidance on the agency's website". That vacatur is a court order rather than the agency withdrawal the Quote asks the President to direct, so it is recorded here and carried as the second citation rather than as an event of its own. Still `partial`, not `done`: two of the eleven named documents are withdrawn, no allowlisted statement says the sweep is complete, and the nine Department of Education documents and the Attorney General's March 2021 Title IX memorandum remain unaccounted for.

  2. Partially done

    The Department of Labor published a Federal Register notice rescinding its 2022 interpretation of WIOA section 188 — a guidance document that applied Bostock's reasoning outside hiring and firing, and the one this Chapter's own department controlled. A documented withdrawal of one of the named class, which under playbook §3's open-ended-ask rule takes the item from directive alone to directive plus implementing action.

  3. Partially done

    This was the first withdrawal of a document section 7(c) names. The Acting Associate Attorney General's memorandum to the Civil Rights Division quotes section 7(c) and says the Division's "Memorandum of March 26, 2021, entitled 'Application of Bostock v. Clayton to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972'" is "hereby withdrawn". In the same directive it also withdrew a document the order does not name: Assistant Attorney General Clarke's memorandum of March 10, 2022, applying Bostock to the non-discrimination provisions of the Safe Streets Act, JJDPA, VOCA and VAWA. That is directive plus a documented implementing action, so `partial` dates from here, eleven months before the DOL notice. Three of the eleven named documents are now accounted for: this memo, the DOL interpretation and the EEOC harassment guidance. The nine Education documents and the White House Toolkit are not. The memorandum is posted only as a PDF under `/crt/media/`, which is why the 2026-09-02 sitemap sweep could not see it (see #1600).

  4. Attempted

    Executive Order 14168 section 7(c) ordered every agency head to "promptly rescind all guidance documents inconsistent with the requirements of this order", and listed eleven by name — the White House Toolkit on Transgender Equality, nine Department of Education documents including the 2021 "Enforcement of Title IX ... in Light of Bostock v. Clayton County", the Attorney General's March 2021 memorandum applying Bostock to Title IX, and the EEOC's April 2024 Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace. A directive; no withdrawal had yet occurred.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Open-ended “all X” ask (playbook §3): a government-wide directive is attempted; directive plus at least one documented implementing action is partial; done would need an allowlisted statement that the sweep is complete, or the named core documents gone. No such statement exists. Corrected 2026-09-03: this bullet previously said the fate of the eleven documents named in section 7(c) “is not recorded in any allowlisted index this agent could read”. That is now wrong for one of them — the EEOC announced the rescission of its 2024 harassment guidance on its own newsroom pages, read in full on 2026-09-03. Two of the eleven are accounted for; nine ED documents, the White House Toolkit and the Attorney General’s March 2021 Title IX memorandum are not. Corrected 2026-10-01: the March 2021 memorandum was withdrawn on 2025-02-12, which makes three of the eleven.
  • Resolved (review, 2026-10-01): the March 2021 memorandum was withdrawn on 2025-02-12. The triage found the Justice Department’s 2026-04-30 Task Force release, which says the department has been “rescinding the Biden Bostock memo”, and left open which memo was meant and when it was withdrawn. The Task Force report (justice.gov/opa/media/1438506/dl, read 2026-10-01) identifies the memo as Pamela Karlan’s March 26, 2021 memorandum on Title IX, but it does not date the withdrawal. The withdrawing instrument is the Acting Associate Attorney General’s memorandum of 2025-02-12 (justice.gov/crt/media/1389946/dl, read in full 2026-10-01), now the 2025-02-12 event. The release and report are not cited: they report the withdrawal, and the memorandum makes it. The item was found from a §1 tail row against #1600 (Bearing 0.09). The matcher never proposed it.
  • federalregister.gov full-text search for Bostock in the window returns the DOL notice above and nothing else that withdraws a guidance document. The EEOC rescission is not a Federal Register document at all: an enforcement guidance is withdrawn by Commission vote and announced on the agency’s own site, which is why an FR-only negative missed it. eeoc.gov answers a bare curl.
  • https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-harassment-workplace — the guidance’s own canonical URL, checked 2026-09-03 and returning HTTP 404. Corroborating, but a 404 is not Evidence and it is recorded here rather than in the frontmatter.
Action
withdraw
Object
Agency notices and guidances applying Bostock
ID
1601