OFCCP director left for EEOC, announced Romanias as new director

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced on September 30, 2025, that former Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) Director Catherine L. Eschbach had been sworn in as Principal Deputy General Counsel at the EEOC. In this role, she is positioned to become the Acting General Counsel now that Andrew Rogers, the former Acting General Counsel, has been confirmed as Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Administrator.

Upon her departure, Eschbach announced that Ashley Romanias, previously a senior policy advisor in the DOL’s Employee Benefit Security Administration, would replace her. This has yet to be formally announced by the OFCCP. Romanias has been with the DOL since July 2025.

E-Verify returns

The federal E-Verify system for employers to check people’s eligibility to work in the United States resumed operations on October 9, 2025. The system went offline when the federal government shutdown on October 1.

A post on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website announced that E-Verify had resumed operations and that participating employers must create cases by October 14 for each employee hired while the system was down. It detailed the steps that employers should take if they could not create cases within an employee’s start because of the outage.

Federal contractors are required to use E-Verify but could not do so when the system was down. The post stated that any calendar day E-Verify was unavailable will not count toward federal contractor deadlines.