Trump Takes His Biggest Step Yet Toward Restoring Meritocracy

Measured in Trump time, it took them eons to get around to it, but the White House has finally taken the most important step it can to restore meritocracy to American society: eliminating disparate-impact theory from civil rights analysis and enforcement.

Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the use of grades for medical licensing exams, credit-based mortgage lending, the ability to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It has been used to eliminate prosecution for a large range of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest; to end police tactics such as proactive stops (otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk); and to purge safety technologies like ShotSpotter and speeding cameras from police departments.

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Disparate-impact theory preserved the hegemony of the civil rights regime long after the original impetus for that regime had all but disappeared. {snip}

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Now all that may be changing. The presidential Executive Order of April 23, 2025, “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” sets out the policy of the United States to “eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.”

To that end, it starts the process of repealing disparate-impact regulations accreted to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by subsequent administrations and requires the cataloguing of state laws that impose disparate-impact liability, among other actions.

Most momentously for law enforcement, the executive order initiates the review of federal consent decrees that rely on disparate-impact analysis (i.e., almost all of them), with the implied goal of dissolving those decrees. {snip} Dissolving such decrees will not only liberate police departments from a costly yoke of superfluous red tape but will also defund the federal monitor racket, whereby monitors earn millions of dollars declaring for years on end that the overseen police department has yet to comply punctiliously with an average of 200 or so mandated reforms, often regarding paperwork.

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