In a recent development in Washington, D.C., a federal courtroom has witnessed the termination of a 44-year-old consent decree that had previously barred the federal government from evaluating the skills and abilities of job applicants.
This decree, known as the Luevano Consent Decree, has its origins in a lawsuit. The Trump administration has fulfilled yet another promise by reinstating the importance of merit-based competence.
According to RedState, the story began in 1979 when Angel Luevano filed a lawsuit alleging that the federal government's Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE), the test used for civil service hiring, disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic applicants.
In the final days of the Carter administration in 1981, a consent decree was entered that effectively prohibited the federal government from using any form of test for federal employment. From 1981 to 1991, the Office of Personnel Management experimented with six different tests, none of which passed the disparate impact test. Consequently, the federal government resorted to hiring based solely on unverified resumes submitted by candidates.
Following the discontinuation of the Professional and Administrative Career Examination and similar tests, the government started relying on "self-assessments" to filter job applicants. This was the only measure that saw a significant number of minorities enter government service. Applicants simply stated their proficiency at a task, without any attempt to verify it or compare them to other applicants. This led to a hiring process that rewarded exaggeration and deceit as much as merit.
The prohibition on government checking peoples competency before hiring them had become particularly crippling in the modern age, with people using artificial intelligence or simply copy-and-paste to take a job advertisements requirements and send an application asserting that they had all those skills, as stated by Kupor.
In an attempt to balance the numbers, the federal government established two race-based programs, the Outstanding Scholar and Bilingual/Bicultural programs, to increase the number of successful Black and Hispanic candidates.
Angel Luevano, the named party in the case, is still alive and readily agreed to end the consent decree when approached. The decree ended quietly as no opposing party objected to its dismissal.
The impact of this action is far-reaching. Although the immediate effect is on federal hiring, state and local governments across the nation have been similarly restricted by the same limitations.
What is particularly noteworthy is that no one defended the indefensible consent decree, suggesting that perhaps the era of hiring as a racial spoils system may be fading.
Andrew Kloster, OPM General Counsel, in an interview with The Daily Wire, stated that the government did not make any concessions to reach the agreement. He said, It was a very easy process. They just flat out agreed. It would not have happened without the original named plaintiff agreeing to it and the judge agreeing to accept it.
This is really kind of an understanding that disparate impact as a way to measure things is not the law of the land anymore. You have to actually show real discrimination. The explicit argument was that the objective tests themselves were racially biased, and obviously thats bogus.
Chief Justice John Roberts once famously said, The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. He was absolutely correct. The surest way to embed racial division and discrimination into society is by establishing them as legal principles.
The notion that Black and Hispanic applicants can't compete on a standardized test is arguably one of the most racist ideas to have emerged. The Trump administration's Justice Department deserves commendation for tackling this remnant of the Jim Crow era and consigning it to the proverbial ash heap of history.
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