Some argue that civil rights laws can protect Americans from woke discrimination. That will not happen without significantly more viewpoint diversity in the federal bureaucracy. The federal workforce leans well to the left. Democrats outnumber Republicans about two-to-one. Headquarters employees live in an even more liberal environment: in Washington, D.C., Joe Biden took 93 percent of the vote.
In theory, civil servants’ political views should not matter. In practice, conservative presidents frequently face internal resistance from long-serving bureaucrats with different political beliefs.
This is especially true in civil rights agencies. They naturally appeal to progressive activists who, once hired, systematically hire like-minded colleagues. During President Obama’s first term, one DOJ Civil Rights Division (CRD) section almost exclusively hired left-wing activists into career positions.
This imbalance makes evenhanded enforcement of civil rights protections challenging. The woke employees who dominate the bureaucracy have no interest in combating woke discrimination.
For example, a DOJ investigation found that Yale University was discriminating against Asian and Caucasian applicants. Trump administration officials wanted to sue, but CRD career staff refused to participate in the litigation. The DOJ could bring charges only by using political appointees and detailing staff from other divisions. Career staff then dropped the case when President Biden took office.
Agencies have few political appointees; they rely on career employees for routine enforcement. Progressive domination of the career bureaucracy makes systematically enforcing protections against woke discrimination impossible.
The only solution is to increase intellectual diversity in the federal bureaucracy. Instead of focusing diversity initiatives on race or other protected characteristics, federal agencies should seek an intellectually balanced workforce. To achieve this, they should actively try to hire career employees whose worldviews differ from those of current staff.
In some departments, this might mean hiring more progressive employees. But in most, including the civil rights agencies, fostering intellectual diversity would mean recruiting and hiring more moderates and conservatives.
This can be done in several ways. The agencies could recruit new career staff from public-interest law firms like the Pacific Legal Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Center for Individual Rights, or from red-state attorneys general offices. Similarly, they could proactively recruit graduates of conservative-leaning schools.
Federal agencies don’t need a majority of their workforce to be conservative. They do need a critical mass of career employees who will enforce laws that activists on either side might oppose.
American society contains an enormous range of views. To a large extent, the career federal workforce—especially in civil rights agencies—does not. Until that changes, civil rights enforcement will not protect all Americans from discrimination.
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