WHEN DONALD TRUMP TOOK OFFICE IN 2017, HE INSTALLED A number of pro-business appointees to lead federal agencies tasked with protecting workers’ rights. But for the first two years of his administration, things continued more or less as normal at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the country’s sole workplace civil rights watchdog. Ami Sanghvi, now a lawyer at the Marek Law Firm, started as a trial attorney at the EEOC just after Barack Obama became president. Yet even during Trump’s first two years, she said, the agency was able “to do pretty great work.”
Then, in May 2019, corporate lawyer Janet Dhillon was sworn in as Trump’s choice for the EEOC’s chair, and Sanghvi soon found the kinds of cases she could pursue restricted. It’s part of why she decided to…