Project 2025 Reshapes Employment Policy: EO 11246 Gone, OFCCP Sidelines

A 930-page manifesto published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation has already dismantled a half-century-old affirmative action regime for federal contractors. Project 2025, formally disclaimed by President Trump, has nonetheless supplied the template for many of his administration's most consequential employment policy moves — and its principal Labor Department author now holds the department's top legal post.

Jonathan Berry, principal author of the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Labor, now serves as Solicitor of Labor, the DOL's chief legal officer. That appointment places the manifesto's architect in direct oversight of programs that regulate minimum wages, pension benefits, federal contracting, worker classification, health and safety, and civil rights — a portfolio the department says touches tens of millions of businesses and individuals.

The change with the widest reach for private employers came early: the rescission of Executive Order 11246. The order had required federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure their employment practices were free from prohibited discrimination. Its rescission was accompanied by the effective elimination of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, the agency that enforced the order.

What did the rescission change for HR?

In a single stroke, five decades of requirements that businesses spending federal dollars not discriminate in employment were discarded, according to the analysis. One consequence followed quickly inside companies: the decimation of corporate HR roles focused on diversity initiatives, particularly those administering diversity programs tied to contractor compliance.

Both actions — the rescission and the defunding of the OFCCP — were central facets of Project 2025, and they formed part of a broader attack on diversity, equity and inclusion that extends well beyond the DOL and the EEOC. The source describes the project's two general principles plainly: reducing the size of government, and eliminating every departmental effort to promote what the project calls "illegal" DEI.

How has the EEOC changed?

The EEOC may serve as a preview of how an agency operates in the age of the unitary executive, in which all EEOC commissioners serve at will. Newly confirmed Chair Lucas and Member Panuccio are following the project's suggestions in several ways:

• Reducing due process protections for federal employees across government
• Refocusing enforcement on religious discrimination against Christians, gender discrimination against males, and ethnic discrimination against American workers
• Working with the Office of Personnel Management to eliminate DEI from federal hiring and from the use of federal funds

The commission is also implementing the project's goals regarding the "cleansing" of the federal workforce so that it reflects the political aims of the presidency. Whether that enforcement refocus produces measurable case outcomes remains to be seen; the source describes direction, not results.

What is coming on classification and unions?

New DOL regulations are in process on two questions HR teams watch closely: how to classify independent workers and how to identify joint employment. The proposed rules, framed as reducing regulatory burdens, would ease the path to independent contractor status and limit when businesses can be held liable as joint employers.

The promise of a lighter classification regime carries a caveat. The source describes these rules as proposals still in process, not final text, and employers have seen classification standards reverse across administrations before. Additional proposals in the works would specifically reduce a union's right to organize and workers' rights to protected speech.

How much of this survives the midterms?

The scope of the project reaches beyond employment. Its principles provide a road map for actions including the elimination of USAID and the defunding of the NIH, the CDC, NOAA and FEMA — moves that remain controversial but, as the source puts it, whose impact no one can deny.

For HR leaders, the structural point matters most. Many of the project's proposals rest on executive action rather than legislation, so the outcome of the midterms is likely to have little impact on its influence or on the administration's continued efforts to make Project 2025 a reality. Employers recalibrating compliance programs around the new rules should plan on the assumption that this framework, not the pre-2024 one, is the operative baseline.