The Trump administration illegally blocked an Obama-era rule that would have required employers to provide more employee-pay data as part of an effort to tackle the wage gap, advocacy groups contend in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that seeks to reinstate the measure.

The National Women's Law Center and Labor Council for Latin American Advancement sued the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and various government officials. President Donald Trump officials in August scuttled a measure that would have required employers with 100 or more employees to report pay for their workers by race, gender and ethnicity.

The change to the annual EEO-1 report, which is used by the commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to enforce discrimination laws, would have gone into effect in March.

Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Equal Employment Advisory Council, opposed the requirements, claiming that the revised rule would lead to administrative hassles and unfairly open them to liability. The Trump administration's budget office asked the EEOC to revisit the pay data collection but offered no timeline or specifics.

Advocacy groups have warned OMB director Mick Mulvaney and other officials that the new data reporting requirements could be “critically important” to help identify compensation discrimination. Several groups, including the National Women's Law Center, filed public records requests seeking information on how Trump officials came to their decision to block the reporting rule.

Officials from the budget office and the EEOC did not immediately respond to request for comment Wednesday.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia claims that budget officials eliminated the rule—the result of a six-year administrative process—with no explanation and no opportunity for public comment. The groups argued that the administration's move has left 60,000 employers covered by the rule with the power “to shield race and gender pay gaps from scrutiny.”

“If it wasn't clear before, it's crystal clear now: women—and the families relying on women's paychecks—are at the bottom of the Trump administration's agenda,” said Emily Martin, general counsel to the National Women's Law Center, which filed the suit with a team from the Democracy Forward Foundation. “By stopping the equal pay data collection, this administration has shown that its loyalties lie with corporate employers who want to hide pay discrimination under the rug. We will not allow this to go unchallenged.”

The lawsuit noted statistics that women working full time are typically paid 80 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make. The gap is even larger for women of color. Black women typically make 63 cents, Native American women only 57 cents and Latinas only 54 cents for every dollar compared to a white man for comparable work, according to the groups. The complaint said the wage gap is consistent in nearly every occupation.

The suit claimed that recent survey data indicates 60 percent of workers in the private sector are discouraged or prohibited from discussing pay.

“Yet, a dearth of comparative salary and wage information may contribute to the persistence of race and gender pay gaps, and limit attempts to remedy them,” according to the lawsuit. The complaint continues: “As a result, employees face significant obstacles in gathering the information that would indicate they have experienced pay discrimination, which undermines their ability to challenge such discrimination. And given the absence of legal obligations to identify wage gaps and report employee pay data, employers lack incentives to undertake their own analysis that could proactively correct pay disparities.”

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