Workforce Bulletin

As featured in #WorkforceWednesday®: This week, we explore how key changes introduced by President Trump’s Executive Order 14281, “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” (“EO 14281”), raise important questions for employers navigating compliance with varying federal, state, and local laws.

EO 14281 poses significant challenges for employers because it seeks to limit disparate impact liability but clashes with established state and local regulations and laws, such as New York City’s law regarding the use of automated employment decision tools. This tension underscores the increasing complexity of managing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven decision-making in the workplace amid shifting legal standards.

On Wednesday, April 23, 2025, President Trump signed EO 14281, titled Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy (EO), stating a new Trump Administration policy “to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible . . . .”

We, along with several of our colleagues, already explained this EO, but this shift in federal policy—barely noticed by most people amidst myriad controversies, memes, and crypto schemes, as well as a number of other executive orders—is important enough to warrant further consideration by anyone who manages workplaces and those of us who advise employers about civil rights laws. As a cover story in the Sunday, May 11, 2025 issue of the New York Times observed, the EO’s directive to curtail the use of disparate impact liability is part of a larger effort to “purge the consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., from the federal government and every facet of American life. . . .” and focuses on “the nation’s bedrock civil rights law.”