Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - Staffing, Workload, and Backlog

Staffing, Workload, and Backlog

In 1975, when backlog reached more than 100,000 charges to be investigated, President Gerald Ford's full requested budget of $62 million was approved. A "Backlog Unit" was created in 1978 in Philadelphia to resolve the thousands of federal equal employment complaints inherited from the Civil Service Commission.

In June 2006, civil rights and labor union advocates publicly complained that the effectiveness of the EEOC was being undermined by budget and staff cuts and the outsourcing of complaint screening to a private contractor whose workers were poorly trained. In 2006 a partial budget freeze prevented the agency from filling vacant jobs, and its staff had shrunk by nearly 20 percent from 2001. A Bush administration official stated that the cuts had been made because it was necessary to direct more money to defense and homeland security. By 2008, the EEOC had lost 25% of its staff over the previous eight years, including investigators and lawyers who handle the cases. The number of complaints to investigate grew to 95,400 in fiscal 2008, up 26 percent from 2006.

Although full-time staffing of the EEOC was cut between 2002 and 2006, Congress increased the commission's budget during that period (as it has almost every year since 1980). The budget was $303 million in fiscal year 2001 to $327 million in fiscal year 2006. The outsourcing to Pearson Government Solutions in Kansas cost the agency 4.9 million and was called a "huge waste of money" by the president of the EEOC employees' union in 2006.