Feds Can’t Hire for Competence Because Jimmy Carter Said It Was Racist

If government bureaucrats seem a little slower than employees elsewhere, it could be because a court order prohibits the federal government from using tests to objectively rank job applicants — on the basis that hiring the most competent employees had an “adverse impact” on blacks and Hispanics.

A 1981 court order blocked agencies from using any test for job applicants that would result in a statistically significant difference in hiring rates between blacks and Hispanics on one hand, and whites on the other. That is akin to blocking colleges from using the SAT.

Now, the Trump administration is set to ask a Washington, D.C., court to dissolve the 40-year ban, arguing that it illegally puts race over merit when it comes to federal hiring, The Daily Wire has learned. {snip}

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management “must be relieved of the Luevano Consent Decree to return common sense to federal hiring,” the Trump administration will tell the D.C. federal court, according to a motion exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire.

The motion says that the decree “blatantly conflicts with current law” because it “requires the federal government to make hiring decisions using explicit racial classification” and “this kind of blatant racial favoritism is not permitted under current Supreme Court precedent.” {snip}

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In the 1970s, OPM evaluated hiring prospects via a written test called the Professional Administrative Career Examination (PACE). Its scores accurately predicted who would go on to be exemplary employees. But a class-action lawsuit said that testing for cognitive ability would reduce the number of blacks and Hispanics in the workforce.

President Jimmy Carter’s administration maintained that PACE was rigorously developed to be fair and was accurate and useful. But in the final days of Carter’s term, the administration agreed to a legal settlement with the plaintiffs agreeing to stop using the test and give them veto power over any replacement.

In the next decade, OPM developed six different tests to attempt to satisfy the decree. But every test that accurately identified the most competent workers also had “the greatest adverse impact” to blacks, the court was told years ago, even though nothing in the tests was, on its face, racist.

In 1990, OPM tried another test, which combined objective questions that measured cognitive ability with a “self-rating section that helps reduce adverse impact.” That still wasn’t enough to create the exact statistical equity demanded by the ruling. As a result, OPM began using solely the self-rating section.

In other words, the only test OPM has found to result in a large portion of blacks in the workforce is one that essentially measures boastfulness. Many federal agencies now hire based on a multiple choice questionnaire where applicants rank themselves based on how great they are at different tasks. This has become a common method of ranking applicants to federal jobs, even though the Merit Systems Protection Board found that is “far less able to predict future performance.”

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The Carter-era settlement also gave a boost to those with “oral Spanish language proficiency and/or the requisite knowledge of Hispanic culture,” while not even mentioning any racial groups except blacks and Hispanics.

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A Daily Wire analysis of OPM data showed that blacks are over-represented in the federal workforce, not under-represented, making it hard to justify the continuance of the affirmative action decree. Eighteen percent of cabinet agency employees are black, about 50% higher than the percentage of blacks in the population of the United States. At some agencies, the disproportionality is astounding, such as 36% at the Department of Education and Department of Housing and Urban Development, and 29% at the Department of Treasury.

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