Six decades of race- and gender-based government hiring initiatives are set to end.
President Donald Trump has repealed a legal landmark from the earliest days of the federal government that obliged federal contractors to establish “affirmative action” programs aimed at increasing workplace diversity.
Trump’s Jan. 21 order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” is focused primarily on ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government and among its contractors.
By equating DEI initiatives with earlier efforts known as “Affirmative Action,” the order also cancels Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Sept. 24, 1965, as the first major policy implementation stemming from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Johnson’s order created the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) within the Department of Labor. The office was tasked with ensuring that federal contractors systematically eliminated all traces of race-based employment discrimination.
The 1965 action prompted an explosion of affirmative action programs in private-sector hiring and in college admissions. A 1978 Supreme Court decision, Regents of University of California v. Bakke, upheld the constitutionality of voluntary Affirmative Action programs but barred the use of race-based numerical quotas.
However, two subsequent Supreme Court decisions effectively legalized the use of racial factors in public and private hiring decisions. The 1986 decision in Sheet Metal Workers v. EEOC allowed federal courts to mandate race-based hiring by craft unions, while the following year’s decision in Johnson v. Transportation Agency added sex to race as permissible grounds for hiring.
Trump’s signature on Wednesday on the new order repeals the 60-year-old mandate with provisions to streamline the federal contracting process and to reiterate that contractors must hire on the basis of merit, not race, sex, or other characteristics.
The order directs the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to immediately halt any programs, regulations, or directives that put factors such as “diversity,” “affirmative action,” or workforce “balancing.”
Elsewhere in the order, Trump declared, “I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.”
