Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Wednesday that the Justice Department was backing away from an assault on police and fire departments that used entrance examinations deemed by DOJ bureaucrats to produce disparate impacts. At issue were consent decrees and financial settlements, both imposed and pending trial, involving the Maryland State Police and the Durham (NC), Cobb County (GA), and South Bend (IN) fire departments. “American communities deserve firefighters and police officers to be chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety — not to meet DEI quotas,” Bondi said in a statement.

At issue were written and physical tests that resulted in a statistically lower number of qualified Black and women applicants even though all applicants were given the same test.

The Biden administration found the tests disqualified Black and female applicants from the hiring process at significantly disproportionate rates, concluding that the tests violated a federal statute that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, sex, color, national origin, and religion.

Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, said in a social media post that the Biden administration had sought to punish police and fire departments “for using race-neutral hiring tools,” even though he said there is “no evidence that the departments engaged in intentional discrimination.”

The settlements imposed included paying reparations, for lack of a better term, to Black and female candidates who were not selected. In the case of the Maryland State Police, the consent decree required hiring failed candidates with retroactive seniority despite no experience. Ironically, Black or women police and firefighters who passed the discriminatory tests received nothing because passing made them honorary White men or something.

The tweets will give you a flavor for the written questions that resulted in the Durham Fire Department being declared racist.

Cobb County was condemned for racist policies for making applicants submit to a credit check.

This backtracking from legal decisions pushed by Merrick Garland's hoodlums is a continuation of a long-running battle between the Marxist left that believes everyone is a member of a racial or ethnic group and Americans who believe we rise and fall to a great extent based on our own attributes unless the government intervenes. The left believes that statistical patterns can detect systemic racism even when, in this case, men and women of all races and ethnicities passed and failed the test.

It will take decades to undo the evil done by the left and to unravel this, to quote Chief Justice John Roberts, "sordid business, this divvying us up by race." But Trump and his appointees are making a valiant effort at changing the systems and dropkicking the people who worked them.