Trump implemented reforms all across the federal government in just one week, taking an even bolder course than he did upon assuming office in 2017. Trump’s first week of work this time was nothing less than the start of an organized and comprehensive effort to reform the federal government to reflect and promote traditional American values.
To me, the most momentous of all the changes Trump effected in week one was his bold decision to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the federal government and, even more daringly, to end affirmative action in federal hiring and employment. Eliminating affirmative action in the sixtieth year since its adoption by President Lyndon Johnson is a historic action, at least as important as Johnson’s original executive order imposing the policy.
Trump backed up those actions by immediately putting all federal government DEI staff on paid administrative leave and requiring the termination of all their offices, positions, and programs within 60 days.
Trump’s Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity directive ordered the Executive Branch to stop pushing DEI and affirmative action immediately:
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor shall immediately cease:
(A) Promoting “diversity”;
(B) Holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking “affirmative action”; and
(C) Allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.
That covers an amazing amount of ground because the federal government is a big customer for the nation’s businesses, as a Wall Street Journal analysis article noted on Friday:
Most big American companies plus thousands of small ones sell goods and services, such as toilet paper, jet fighters and website design, to the U.S. government. The government uses its clout to mandate policies on everything from their wages to workforce diversity practices.
In 2023, the federal government committed around $759 billion to contracts with private companies, including the likes of Microsoft, Google and Boeing. By some estimates, around 20% of the U.S. workforce is employed at suppliers to the federal government.
On top of that, the new rules will affect much more than the firms that do business directly with the feds. “[R]ules for federal contractors—typically well-known companies whose policies tend to influence other firms—are likely to ripple out to other employers,” the article notes.
In addition, “one executive order asks the attorney general to submit a report to the White House within four months with recommendations to ‘encourage’ private companies ‘to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI,’” the article reports. This directive could extend beyond businesses to include countless other institutions, Trump’s EO states:
As a part of this plan, each agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars
Together, these directives “have the potential to revamp DEI at thousands of private workplaces across the country,” the Journal observes—and well beyond, as the above quote from Trump’s EO demonstrates.
The executive orders are intended to root out what Trump calls “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement” throughout all the nation’s institutions via government-enforced discrimination based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing,” as stated in Trump’s order on Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.
There will be plenty of resistance to Trump’s efforts. It has already begun, in fact, with filings of lawsuits and the typical blast of media hysteria and misrepresentations. What Trump has set out to do is nothing less than start the process of rolling back the race- and sex-based discrimination set in motion by Johnson 60 years ago. Trump has explicitly stated that his motive is to restore the idea of merit as the basis for judgments about rewards for individual initiative. Along with decentralization (which I wrote about here last week), meritocracy was one of the key principles that made the American experiment such a success in the nation’s first two centuries.
The rejection of those principles that began in the 1960s has brought an acceleration of social disorder, economic turmoil, and discrimination instead of the promised peace, prosperity, and fairness. The elevation of merit above birth is now in the foreground as a central element of Trump’s intended return to traditional American values. This emphasis on merit is central to all the executive orders and other actions Trump took in his first week back in office.
In addition to reflecting the nation’s founding values, Trump’s EOs would restore Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colorblind society instead of one ruled by a government increasingly intent on micromanaging the distribution and redistribution of the fruits of people’s investments of labor and capital, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board notes:
It’s appropriate the President signed the order just after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. King called America to its better self—by making good on its founding promise that people would be judged on their character and merit.
That would indeed be a big change.
Sources: The White House; The Wall Street Journal; The Wall Street Journal
Sam Karnick is a senior fellow and director of publications for The Heartland Institute.
3 comments:
The challenge is to ensure merit means merit and not the restoration of the old boys club. Merit does not mean the same as me, but the ability to fulfil the role by constructively creating positive outcomes. This may mean looking at and doing things differently but as long as it is about positively moving forward then long may it live.
Incidentally this can become quite philosophical eg does constructive include disassembling old ways? How much positively outcome is necessary?
The key though is getting people in with ideas and capability based on them being people not artificial subsets and behavong accordingly. Eg no less pay because some one is Asian or female or has only three toes.
No doubt it's a big No from Luxon!
i trust such info reaches Luxon and is not shielded from him by staff chosen for DEI and pro maori bent.
Post a Comment