One of President Donald Trump’s most popular reforms is his executive order abolishing federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) dictates and their efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Trump’s order outraged progressives and sparked a torrent of legal challenges. Can Trump end a half century of federal tyrannizing of private employment policies?
DEI’s absurdities are the end game of perpetual power grabs and and bureaucratic conniving. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has been at the forefront of concocting race and gender mandates and browbeating businesses to submit to often harebrained or illegal demands. Trump fired two Democratic EEOC commissioners and the agency’s top lawyer. After he appointed Andrea Lucas—who has served as an EEOC commissioner since 2020—as the acting chair of the agency, she announced she would prioritize “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination.”
The history of the EEOC exemplifies how politics perverts moral ideals. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which created the EEOC, explicitly banned racial quotas and specifically required that an employer have shown an intent to discriminate in order to be found guilty. However, by the late 1960s, the EEOC had intentionally subverted the law by establishing a definition of discrimination that was the opposite of what Congress specified. EEOC Chairman Clifford Alexander announced in 1968, “We…here at EEOC believe in numbers…Our most valid standard is in numbers…The only accomplishment is when we look at all those numbers and see a vast improvement in the picture.” Hugh Davis Graham, in his history The Civil Rights Era, noted of the EEOC’s early top staff, “As the infant EEOC’s brains trust, they began the process of maximizing agency power by subverting the congressional restrictions” on the agency.”
Equal opportunity policy quickly degenerated into pursuing almost everything except equality. Thanks to the EEOC, seeking the best person for the job went from being part of the American heritage to being a federal crime. The EEOC claimed a right to decree which people and which groups received which opportunities—and to punish those who government officials decreed did not give the right opportunities to the right people or right groups.
The EEOC used a federal iron fist to impose a “know-nothing egalitarianism” on America. In 1970, the EEOC issued regulations to severely restrict the use of testing for hiring and promotion because minorities tended to score lower than white applicants. Herman Belz, author of Equality Transformed, noted, “Achievement of identical rejection rates for minority and nonminority job applicants was expressly stated as a policy objective…Yet the guidelines did not stipulate a concern with qualified minority applicants.” In its lawsuits and decrees and “guidance,” the EEOC almost always intervened against competence—in support of the notion that workers do not need to be as intelligent, as literate, or as competent as an employer demanded.
The EEOC routinely and effectively punished employers if minority job applicants gave the wrong answers to test questions. The EEOC assumed that a fair test would automatically provide equal scores among all racial groups of test-takers, although it had no evidence for that assumption—only a surfeit of moral self-righteousness. The result was race norming—the covert manipulation of people’s test scores to produce an equal number of winners in each race. With race norming, each citizen has an equal opportunity to have his job test scores secretly raised or lowered in response to government manipulation or intimidation.
To secure racial justice, the EEOC entitled itself to decree the exact percentage of ethnic identity in a company’s job force. The EEOC sued Daniel Lamp Co. in 1991 for allegedly discriminating against blacks. The company was in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago and all its twenty-six employees were either black or Hispanic. But the EEOC announced that Daniel Lamp violated federal law because it did not have 8.45 black employees on its payroll. That was so boneheaded that even 60 Minutes whacked the agency.
Arbitrary power is the key to the EEOC dominating America. In 1994, EEOC Chair Gilbert Casellas said, “I hope people worry when they get a call from the EEOC” the same way they feared a call from the IRS. (Casellas publicly condemned my articles on the EEOC in 1995.) People naturally worried because the EEOC constantly created new offenses that could not be found in federal statute books.
EEOC officials have proclaimed private companies guilty of violating or impeding “equal opportunity” because of their failure to disregard employee theft, failure to disregard an employee’s assaults on co-workers, failure by an upscale women’s clothing chain to hire men for sales jobs that “included helping women try on clothes,” failure by a women’s-only health club to hire male attendants who would work in locker rooms and shower area, and failure to hire (in higher percentages) members of favored groups that were not qualified at the time but were, in the EEOC’s judgment, “trainable.” The EEOC even claimed a right to prohibit Hooters restaurants from relying on female servers, asserting that the restaurant chain was violating the right of potential male waiters everywhere.
During the Joe Biden era, the EEOC left no progressive dictate behind. The EEOC devoted itself to creating new “protections” for LGBTQ+ employees and made a huge civil rights issue about transgender access to bathrooms. EEOC defined “misgendering” a transgender person as illegal sexual harassment. The only thing a disgruntled employee needed to do to turn their worksite into a crime scene was to change their gender.
The premise of modern civil rights law is that federal coercion produces a fairer result than the voluntary agreements of private citizens. But government officials cannot be given the power to equalize without also having the power to discriminate against politically disfavored groups. John Phillip Reid, author of The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, observed, “Fear of power made security [from government oppression] a more appealing abstraction than equality. Eighteenth century constitutional theory could not contemplate the use of government to work for equality in the form of social or economic justice, because it could not trust government.”
Unfortunately, modern Americans are far more politically gullible than their ancestors. The history of the EEOC vindicates all the distrust that the Founding Fathers had towards arbitrary power. The EEOC’s sordid record should also stifle any idealist scheme to unleash officialdom to forcibly redeem humanity.
