In a brief hearing in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., a 44-year-old consent decree that prohibited the federal government from assessing the skills and abilities of job applicants ended. The decree, known as the Luevano Consent Decree, based on its roots in the Luevano vs. Ezell case. In doing so, President Trump's administration made good on another promise to bring egalitarian competence back into fashion.
The action began in 1979, when Angel Luevan filed a lawsuit alleging that the federal government’s Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE), the test used for civil service hiring, had a disparate impact on Black and Hispanic applicants. In 1981, the Carter administration entered into a consent decree during its waning days that made it impossible for the federal government to use any kind of test for federal employment. Between 1981 and 1991, the Office of Personnel Management experimented with six different tests, all of which failed to pass the disparate impact test. In the end, the federal government began hiring based solely on unvetted resumes submitted by candidates.
After the demise of the Professional and Administrative Career Examination and similar tests, the government began relying on “self-assessments” to sift through job applicants, as it was the only measure that saw a sufficient number of minorities enter government. Applicants simply declared how good they were at a task, with no attempt to verify it or compare them to other applicants. That led to a hiring process that rewarded boasting and fabrications as much as merit.
Kupor said the de facto prohibition on government checking people’s competency before hiring them — at which point they become difficult to remove — had become particularly crippling in the modern age, with people using artificial intelligence or simply copy-and-paste to take a job advertisement’s requirements and send an application asserting that they had all those skills.
To get the numbers right, the federal government established two race-based programs to accelerate the number of successful Black and Hispanic candidates, the Outstanding Scholar and Bilingual/Bicultural programs.
The named party in the case, Angel Luevano, is still alive, and when approached about agreeing to end the consent decree, he readily agreed.
The impact of this action can't be overstated. Even though the immediate effect is on federal hiring, state and local governments across the nation have been similarly hamstrung by the same restrictions.
BACKGROUND:
What is particularly notable is that no one showed up to defend an indefensible consent decree, indicating that perhaps the days of hiring as a racial spoils system may be receding into the rearview mirror.
OPM General Counsel Andrew Kloster told The Daily Wire in an interview that the government did not make any concessions to reach the agreement.
“It was a very easy process,” he said. “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 that’s bogus.”
Chief Justice John Roberts famously said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” He was right. The surest way to bake racial division and discrimination into society is by establishing them as legal principles. I find the idea that Black and Hispanic applicants can't compete on a standardized test to be one of the most racist ideas to come down the pike since Plessy vs. Ferguson. President Trump's Justice Department deserves high marks for taking on this vestige of the Jim Crow era and sending it to the proverbial ash heap of history.
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