U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Advances Bill That Includes Funds for OFCCP in FY2026

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The U.S. Senate’s Appropriations Committee has advanced for a full Senate vote an appropriations package that includes $105,997,600 in funds for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP).   

If the full Senate votes to approve the budget bill as drafted by the Senate Appropriations Committee and leaves in the amounts allocated to OFCCP, the next legislative step is for the House of Representatives and the Senate to reconcile the different funding bills.   

It’s hard to predict where this will land.  On the one hand, we’ve seen an increase in activity by OFCCP in the last month.  

• On June 27, 2025, OFCCP Director Catherine Eshbach sent a letter to contractors inviting them to use the OFCCP Contractor Portal to share information about how they have implemented Executive Order 14173 and wound down compliance with Executive Order 11246.
• On July 2, 2025, the Secretary of Labor issued Order 08-2025. This Order officially ended the disability and veteran portions of audits that already had been scheduled and informed the government contractor community that no further audits from the November 2024 scheduling list would be scheduled.  But the order also reminded contractors that “Section 503 and VEVRAA, along with their implementing regulations, remain in effect and contractors should continue to otherwise comply with their obligations under the Section 503 and VEVRAA regulatory schemes.”
• OFCCP issued three Notices in The Federal Register on July 2, 2025, rescinding or amending its implementing regulations.  OFCCP is proposing: 
  • to rescind the regulations implementing Executive Order 11246, which required preparation of affirmative action plans for women and minorities, among other obligations; 
  • to update the regulations implementing VEVRAA and incorporate the enforcement provisions that previously were found in the EO 11246 regulations; and  
  • to change the regulations implementing Section 503 by removing all disability data collection and analysis requirements, including the obligation to invite applicants and employees to self-identify, to tally the number of disabled applicants and hires in the data collection analysis table, and to prepare a utilization analysis comparing disabled employee percentages against the 7% goal.
    
    Comments on these proposals are due the Tuesday after Labor Day, September 2, 2025, and we presume that OFCCP will need personnel to digest them before publishing the final rules. 
• On July 31, 2025, the OFCCP updated its Protected Veteran Hiring Benchmark, lowering it from 5.2% to 5.1% of hires. 

The $105,997,600 funding in the Senate Appropriation Committee’s bill is quite similar to the funding that Congress approved for OFCCP in prior years: 

• $110,976,000 – FY2025 
• $110,917,000 – FY2024 
• $110,892,000 – FY2023 

This is odd considering OFCCP’s narrowed mission and significantly smaller headcount after the rescission of Executive Order 11246. That said, there is essentially no discussion in the Senate’s bill justifying the requested appropriation to OFCCP, which suggests that not a lot of thought went into determining the amount. The Department of Labor’s budget request for FY2026 did not seek any funding for OFCCP, proposing instead to relocate VEVRAA enforcement to the Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment Training Service and Section 503 enforcement to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.   

Although the Committee is sending this package to the Senate floor, it does not mean that OFCCP will be allocated these funds.  We won’t know what OFCCP’s FY2026 funding will be until both houses of Congress pass a final budget.  If OFCCP does get funded at $105,997,600, the Agency seemingly would have the resources to have a role in enforcing Executive Order 14173—the ban of federal contractor unlawful DEI programs.