The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has recently suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in court, and today it got another one.

In EEOC v. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a Second Circuit panel unanimously upheld the trial court’s dismissal of the commission’s Equal Pay Act lawsuit. A few excerpts:

The district court concluded that the EEOC failed to allege sufficient facts to state a plausible claim that female and male attorneys at the Port Authority performed “equal work” despite receiving unequal pay. Because the EEOC did not allege any facts supporting a comparison between the attorneys’ actual job duties, thereby precluding a reasonable inference that the attorneys performed “equal work,” we AFFIRM. . . . [D]espite a three‐year investigation conducted with the Port Authority’s cooperation, the EEOC’s complaint and incorporated interrogatory responses rely almost entirely on broad generalizations drawn from job titles and divisions, and supplemented only by the unsupported assertion that all Port Authority nonsupervisory attorneys had the same job, to support its “substantially equal” work claim. As such, the EEOC’s complaint was rightly dismissed. … Simply put, the EEOC has not alleged a single nonconclusory fact supporting its assertion that the claimants’ and comparators’ jobs required “substantially equal” skill and effort. That the EEOC’s failure to include such factual allegations followed a three‐year investigation into the Port Authority’s pay practices – an investigation conducted with the Port Authority’s cooperation – is of some note. … Here, the EEOC had ready access to Port Authority documents and employees, including to the claimants asserting EPA violations, yet the EEOC failed – in fact, repeatedly rejected the need – to allege any factual basis for inferring that the attorneys at issue performed “substantially equal” work.

You get the idea.