Notes from the Field — July 23, 2026
On July 21 and 22, within a day of each other, two federal agencies stopped doing something they’d each done for decades: counting, and asking.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 to stop requiring the roughly 73,000 employers who file it — companies with 100 or more workers, federal contractors with 50 or more — to submit the EEO-1 report, an annual breakdown of who holds which job, by race and sex, across ten job categories. The requirement dates to 1966, two years after the Civil Rights Act that created the agency. It has survived ten administrations. The Commission’s Republican majority argues the data is “unnecessary to enforce anti-discrimination laws” and that collecting it risks encouraging companies to “correct statistical imbalances” — the position, stated plainly, is that measuring a pattern might tempt someone to fix it, and that risk outweighs the value of knowing whether the pattern exists.
The same week, NPR reported the administration has terminated or suspended more than 100 federal advisory committees — the outside-expert panels agencies from NASA to the CDC have leaned on since Congress standardized them in 1972. One of NASA’s, the Astrophysics Advisory Committee, was dissolved early in the term; former members say NASA has since fallen behind on commitments to international partners on a major gravitational-wave telescope, with no outside body positioned to say so publicly. NASA calls the change a “restructuring.” The White House calls the committees “redundant, unnecessary or ineffective.”
Different words. Same shape.
Neither the EEO-1 form nor a NASA advisory panel had power to force anything. That was never the point. The form made patterns visible — an outside researcher, journalist, or worker’s-rights group could look up a company and see whether its executive ranks matched its workforce. The panel gave outside scientists a public channel to flag a mission going sideways before it fully went sideways. Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the EEOC’s lone remaining Democrat, dissented on the grounds that the agency now investigates complaints one at a time, blind to the patterns that used to tell it where to look first.
The Federal Advisory Committee Act exists because Congress found the opposite problem in 1972: agencies too cozy with the industries they regulated, taking advice behind closed doors from panels stacked with insiders. FACA’s fix was public meetings and published minutes — a channel for outside expertise the agency didn’t fully control. The Act never required any particular committee to exist forever. It only governs the ones that do. Eliminating over a hundred of them isn’t a rule change. It’s the removal of the thing a rule change would otherwise have to go through.
There’s no evidence the two moves share a memo, and neither agency has described them as related. What they share is an effect: the removal of a source of information the agency in charge didn’t generate and doesn’t control. A demographic report an employer files. A scientist’s warning that a mission is behind schedule. Neither was ever binding. Both made it harder for anyone outside the room to know whether the room was doing its job.
The EEOC still has authority to investigate discrimination complaints. NASA still has scientists it can call when it wants advice. What’s gone is the part that didn’t wait to be asked.
This is Block 9’s argument, documented in real time.
Essay 3 — The People in the Room
Broken Frames — Block 9: The Darkened Room (not yet published — thebrokenframes.substack.com/s/broken-frames)
Copyright 2026 — Steve Sagnotti
Sources: PBS NewsHour, “Federal civil rights agency moves to stop requiring demographic data collection after 60 years,” July 22, 2026. Axios, “EEOC votes to stop collecting race and sex data on U.S. workers,” July 22, 2026. ABC News, “US civil rights agency moves to end demographic data collection after 60 years,” July 22, 2026. Time, “Trump Administration Moves to Stop Collecting Demographic Data on U.S. Workers After 60 Years,” July 22, 2026. NPR, “Trump cuts target federal advisory boards. What does it mean for agencies like NASA?,” July 23, 2026. EveryCRSReport, “Federal Advisory Committees: An Overview.”
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