On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he had revoked a six-decade-old executive order designed to combat workplace discrimination and promote affirmative action among federal contractors, undoing a labor standard that stretches back to the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The rule Trump nuked, Executive Order 11246, forbade federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It granted the Labor Department the power to enforce its provisions through a contracting standards office.
The order was part of a long history of the federal government using contracting rules to try to root out discrimination. Signed a year after the Civil Rights Act was passed, it explicitly required that employers who accept federal contract money take “affirmative action” not to discriminate against job applicants or workers.
In a statement Wednesday, Trump attacked it as “radical DEI preferencing,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI programs, which aim to improve workplace conditions and reduce hiring disparities for minorities, have grown into a conservative obsession and major policy target for Trump and his allies, who often say DEI enables “reverse” discrimination instead.
The regulations Trump revoked included “placement goals,” or targets for employers to meet in the hiring of underrepresented groups.
Moving forward, Trump said, the Labor Department would be forbidden from “pushing contractors to balance their workforce based on race, sex, gender identity, sexual preference, or religion.” He called his order rolling back the 60-year-old protections “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Labor Department’s webpage still described Johnson’s executive order as a “historic step towards equal employment opportunity” and said it “remains a major safeguard” for millions of workers.
“Signed by President Johnson that early autumn Friday in 1965, Executive Order 11246 became a key landmark in a series of federal actions aimed at ending racial, religious and ethnic discrimination, an effort that dated back to the anxious days before the U.S. was thrust into World War II,” the site reads.
Democrats and advocacy groups were quick to criticize the move. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Trump’s order would “gut core civil rights protections” as well as the Labor Department office that enforces them.
Judy Conti, government affairs director at the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, said Trump had stripped away a “key tool” in combating discrimination.
“This is not a return to so-called ‘meritocracy,’” Conti said in a statement. “Rather, it’s an attempted return to the days when people of color, women, and other marginalized people lacked the tools to ensure that they were evaluated on their merits.”