Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
MSNBC / Hayes Brown: Trump is gutting the Civil Rights Act to boost people like Pete Hegseth
MSNBC / Hayes Brown - Trump is gutting the Civil Rights Act to boost people like Pete Hegseth
In a new executive order, the White House is targeting making it easier for businesses to discriminate during the hiring process.
April 25, 2025, 3:12 PM EDT
By Hayes Brown, MSNBC Opinion Writer/Editor
President Donald Trump swung his executive wrecking ball on Wednesday at a key component of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in a move that threatens decades of anti-discrimination efforts. Under a new executive order with the Orwellian title “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” his administration will deprioritize enforcement of statutes and regulations that cover “disparate impact liability.” In attacking this critical legal tool in the name of supposed “meritocracy,” Trump is greenlighting rampant discrimination — as long as you’re subtle about it.
Imagine a business has a “Help Wanted” sign in its window, but below that is another that reads “No Black applicants allowed.” This would be a clear violation of anti-discrimination laws. But suppose instead the business specifies that applicants can only live in a certain part of town — one that happens to be both extremely affluent and very white. Under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that business could be sued for a hiring practice that seems neutral on its face but still produces a discriminatory effect.Importantly, such discriminatory effects don’t have to be malicious, or even intentional, under the disparate impact standard. The effects of long-term systemic racism, sexism and other prejudices are, after all, often hard to prove via a “smoking gun” of blatant discrimination. In 1971’s Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the Supreme Court upheld Title VII’s provisions to ensure that equal employment opportunity exists across the board. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the majority that “Congress has now provided that tests or criteria for employment or promotion may not provide equality of opportunity merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox.”
Like most of Trump’s crusade against “diversity, equity and inclusion” standards, this executive order turns the idea of discrimination on its head to argue that disparate impact “violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment for all by requiring race-oriented policies and practices to rebalance outcomes along racial lines.” It builds off long-running conservative animus toward the legal tool of Title VII, premised on claims that employers have been forced to focus on race and sex at the expense of other qualifications in hiring and promotions. It’s basically the same argument we’ve heard for years, one where companies are accused of discriminating against white men in favor of hiring, for example, a supposedly less qualified Black woman instead.Trump can’t completely strike the provision from the books because Congress codified the Griggs decision further into law in a 1991 update to the Civil Rights Act. But he’s still told his administration to “deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent they include disparate-impact liability.” This effort also includes, as The Washington Post explained, having Attorney General Pam Bondi revoke Justice Department regulations “that bar any program receiving federal financial support from discrimination based on ‘race, color, or national origin.’”
This latest executive order is part and parcel with Trump’s overarching attack on his perceived enemies, be they legal, political or ideological in nature. The New York Times reported that last month the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “began questioning the hiring practices of 20 of the country’s biggest law firms” — many of which have been targeted for opposing Trump — “claiming that their efforts to recruit Black and Hispanic lawyers and create a more diverse work force may have potentially discriminated against white candidates.” The administration has also slashed funding for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, a 1968 law that Trump himself ran afoul of as a New York real estate manager back in the 1970s.The attack on disparate impact is especially pernicious, given how this change will bolster the less obvious forms of racist or sexist bias that the law sought to uproot. Last year, the Brookings Institution’s Chiraag Bains examined how updated disparate impact laws are crucial to preventing “algorithmic discrimination” as the use of artificial intelligence spreads. While most programmers aren’t purposefully coding programs to harm minority users, those biases can still easily seep into their work. Without disparate impact analyses, proving the harm from seemingly innocuous lines of code will be more difficult.
/snip
In a new executive order, the White House is targeting making it easier for businesses to discriminate during the hiring process.
April 25, 2025, 3:12 PM EDT
By Hayes Brown, MSNBC Opinion Writer/Editor
President Donald Trump swung his executive wrecking ball on Wednesday at a key component of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in a move that threatens decades of anti-discrimination efforts. Under a new executive order with the Orwellian title “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” his administration will deprioritize enforcement of statutes and regulations that cover “disparate impact liability.” In attacking this critical legal tool in the name of supposed “meritocracy,” Trump is greenlighting rampant discrimination — as long as you’re subtle about it.
Imagine a business has a “Help Wanted” sign in its window, but below that is another that reads “No Black applicants allowed.” This would be a clear violation of anti-discrimination laws. But suppose instead the business specifies that applicants can only live in a certain part of town — one that happens to be both extremely affluent and very white. Under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that business could be sued for a hiring practice that seems neutral on its face but still produces a discriminatory effect.Importantly, such discriminatory effects don’t have to be malicious, or even intentional, under the disparate impact standard. The effects of long-term systemic racism, sexism and other prejudices are, after all, often hard to prove via a “smoking gun” of blatant discrimination. In 1971’s Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the Supreme Court upheld Title VII’s provisions to ensure that equal employment opportunity exists across the board. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the majority that “Congress has now provided that tests or criteria for employment or promotion may not provide equality of opportunity merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox.”
Like most of Trump’s crusade against “diversity, equity and inclusion” standards, this executive order turns the idea of discrimination on its head to argue that disparate impact “violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment for all by requiring race-oriented policies and practices to rebalance outcomes along racial lines.” It builds off long-running conservative animus toward the legal tool of Title VII, premised on claims that employers have been forced to focus on race and sex at the expense of other qualifications in hiring and promotions. It’s basically the same argument we’ve heard for years, one where companies are accused of discriminating against white men in favor of hiring, for example, a supposedly less qualified Black woman instead.Trump can’t completely strike the provision from the books because Congress codified the Griggs decision further into law in a 1991 update to the Civil Rights Act. But he’s still told his administration to “deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent they include disparate-impact liability.” This effort also includes, as The Washington Post explained, having Attorney General Pam Bondi revoke Justice Department regulations “that bar any program receiving federal financial support from discrimination based on ‘race, color, or national origin.’”
This latest executive order is part and parcel with Trump’s overarching attack on his perceived enemies, be they legal, political or ideological in nature. The New York Times reported that last month the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “began questioning the hiring practices of 20 of the country’s biggest law firms” — many of which have been targeted for opposing Trump — “claiming that their efforts to recruit Black and Hispanic lawyers and create a more diverse work force may have potentially discriminated against white candidates.” The administration has also slashed funding for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, a 1968 law that Trump himself ran afoul of as a New York real estate manager back in the 1970s.The attack on disparate impact is especially pernicious, given how this change will bolster the less obvious forms of racist or sexist bias that the law sought to uproot. Last year, the Brookings Institution’s Chiraag Bains examined how updated disparate impact laws are crucial to preventing “algorithmic discrimination” as the use of artificial intelligence spreads. While most programmers aren’t purposefully coding programs to harm minority users, those biases can still easily seep into their work. Without disparate impact analyses, proving the harm from seemingly innocuous lines of code will be more difficult.
/snip