When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, establishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he spoke of the “unending search for justice.” Decades later, the agency is weaponizing obscure rules, ignoring common sense, and withholding critical information from the public. An unbelievable case out of California demonstrates why a course correction is urgently needed.

In 2017, Aaron Steed and his company, Meathead Movers, was hit with a $15 million fine from the EEOC on a flimsy claim of “age discrimination.” When Steed dared to speak out about this, the federal government tried to silence him with a gag order — threatening legal consequences if he told the public his side of the story.

Meathead Movers, founded in 1997 as a small, family-run business, is now California’s largest independently owned moving company, employing more than 300 people. The company is built on a culture of personal responsibility and excellence, symbolized by its signature practice of having employees jog to and from the truck when not carrying furniture. Its workplace has helped young people develop job skills and discipline that last a lifetime. The only standard that matters is whether someone can do the job.

But that hasn’t stopped the federal government from launching an all-out assault.

Apparently unable to find actual victims with complaints, the EEOC has resorted to punishing a company for promoting a culture of energy, hard work, and physical fitness. And now it also wants to hide its actions from public scrutiny.

“The EEOC is demanding that we pay an amount that we simply can’t afford for something that we absolutely did not do wrong,” Steed said. “There’s no one that stood up and said, ‘Meathead Movers discriminated against me.”

Steed is a victim of the agency’s entrenched machinery, staffed by bureaucrats who have been there since the Obama administration.

Appointed by President Trump and recently re-nominated to serve as the EEOC’s acting chair, Andrea Lucas has publicly rejected the radical expansion of so-called “equity enforcement.” But while Lucas’s public statements represent a return to sanity at the top, the EEOC still continues to target law-abiding employers like Meathead Movers, twisting antidiscrimination laws for ideological ends while hiding behind closed doors when confronted with calls for transparency.

In Steed’s ongoing case, he is racking up legal fees, all because he hired workers to do physically demanding work. The case against Steed does not appear to be based on employees or members of the public filing a complaint. After an eight-year investigation — launched under the Obama administration — the EEOC is instead pursuing an extremely rare “agency-initiated” lawsuit. Of the thousands of cases the EEOC handles each year, only a handful are brought this way.

That raises serious questions. If no one complained, and if the company is hiring workers based on the real, physical demands of the job, what is this case really about?

In March, the Goldwater Institute filed a public records request demanding answers: Were any complaints filed? Has the EEOC taken similar action against other companies? The agency refused to hand over any of that basic information, citing privacy concerns. But privacy is for individuals — transparency is for the government. And the Goldwater Institute is not seeking any information that involves personal privacy. Because the EEOC has refused to release the information as required by law, Goldwater has sued it in federal court.

The government should not be allowed to operate in secrecy while destroying a model small business. Americans deserve to know why unelected federal bureaucrats targeted a model company in California. And Aaron Steed — who built a business the right way — has every right to speak freely in his own defense.

The EEOC won’t tell the American public what it is up to. We will see them in court to compel the transparency the law demands.

Jon Riches is the Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute.