I’ve recently done a few appearances on Destiny’s livestream where he interrogated me on voting Republican. Honestly, when supporting a party is only a 60/40 decision for you, it’s hard to debate someone who is completely convinced in the other direction. When I wrote about why I was voting for Trump before the election, I had to tell the truth about the things that make me uncomfortable about the conservative movement, and its leader in particular.

But yesterday I realized that there’s an obvious answer to the question of why I should be a Republican. They’re the only ones who might listen to me! My vote is insignificant, and won’t determine an election. The only way I can hope to have influence is through my ideas. So I could start identifying with the left today and encourage everyone to vote Democrat, and my influence over policy will slide towards zero. If Destiny thinks I have sensible ideas, he himself should want me to be in a position to make a difference.

All of that was made clear to me when Trump last night repealed and replaced Executive Order 11246. This is a big deal. I wrote about how this little known EO changed American society in The Origins of Woke:

While Johnson originally signed EO 11246, it was the Nixon administration that ironically created the affirmative action regime we see today, over the resistance of a bipartisan coalition in Congress. Under the Labor Department, the administration began by forcing affirmative action on construction workers, first in Philadelphia, and then nationwide. This was followed up in 1971 by Revised Order No. 4, which expanded the regulations beyond the construction industry to all contractors and subcontractors doing business with the government beyond a minimum threshold, forcing them to adopt goals and timetables whenever women or minorities were shown to be “underutilized” relative to the relevant labor pool...
Nonetheless, while its legal basis is murky, there is much less doubt about the reach of EO 11246 and its successor documents. Because of the extent to which government spends money and involves itself in the economy, its ability to regulate contractors has always been a major source of leverage. Employers required to have an affirmative action program must include all of their facilities, employees, and operations in the plan, even if the government contracts in question represent only a small portion of their business. Moreover, the biggest employers in the private sector are more likely than most other businesses to have federal contracts; about a third of Fortune 500 companies did so in 2015. Today, about a quarter of the American workforce is employed by a government contractor. It is important to note that, pursuant to EO 11478 of 1969, affirmative action also exists within the federal government itself, which employs another 2 percent of the workforce.
Under affirmative action guidelines as applied to government contractors, it is no exaggeration to say that businesses are forced to be obsessed with race and sex. Long before people noticed that identity-related issues had consumed American universities, something resembling modern wokeness had already been forced on big business. Affirmative action is required for every employer with fifty employees that does at least $50,000 worth of business a year with the federal government, and every subcontractor with at least $10,000 in business. Government regulations specify that a “central premise underlying affirmative action is that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce, generally, will reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” If a contractor falls short in any particular area, it must take “practical steps” to make up for its deficiency.

One of the most sinister aspects of all this is that it forced managers at businesses who might want nothing to do with leftist ideas to become foot soldiers in the project of identity-based governance.

The employer is required to participate in a detailed process of identity-based classification and analysis. Middle managers for construction companies and retail store owners become social scientists. First, employers are forced to create an “organizational profile,” defined as “a detailed graphical or tabular chart, text, spreadsheet or similar presentation of the contractor’s organizational structure.” The contractor must break his business down into “organizational units,” and record the race, gender, and ethnicity of the supervisor of each one. Within each unit, the business must record the number of males and females of each of the following groups: blacks, Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives. Race and sex are to be determined by self-identification, with the employer prohibited from overruling an individual’s selection, although visual classification is acceptable under certain conditions. The next step is engaging in a “workforce analysis,” which divides the employees of a company by job title. Those with titles that are similar in terms of work and pay are combined into “job groups.”
This initial work is required to get to the “job group analysis.” This means comparing the number of women and minorities in each job group to their estimated availability in the population. And how does one determine availability? By coming up with a number for the “percentage of minorities or women with requisite skills in the reasonable recruitment area.” When a particular demographic is underrepresented in a job group, the employer must create “placement goals” to correct its deficiency…
Every aspect of employers’ analysis is reviewable by government bureaucrats. For the same reason that a contractor can always get around affirmative action requirements, the government can always find grounds to apply pressure on a business. From the contractor’s perspective, all they can know for certain is that they must go through the motions, and that hiring and promoting more minorities and women will be less likely to get them in trouble.

In my chapter on policy suggestions, I wrote that repealing EO 11246 was low-hanging fruit, but a more aggressive approach would involve banning government contractors from engaging in DEI policies.

I promoted my ideas to conservatives, including on Vivek’s podcast in early 2023, not long after telling him about EO 11246 for the first time. As Vox noted, he soon started promising to repeal the order on his first day in office if elected. Here’s a clip of me suggesting to him that a Republican president go further than that and use a new EO to ban DEI among contractors.

With Trump, it took two days. But we’ve gotten to the same place. Yesterday, the president signed a new executive order with the title “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 3 repeals Executive Order 11246, giving contractors only 90 days before they must stop acting in accordance with previous rules. It then lays out new requirements.

(ii) The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor shall immediately cease:
(A) Promoting “diversity”;
(B) Holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking “affirmative action”; and
(C) Allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.

As I suggested Trump do, it then goes on to mandate color blindness.

(iii) In accordance with Executive Order 13279 of December 12, 2002 (Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations), the employment, procurement, and contracting practices of Federal contractors and subcontractors shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws.
(iv) The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award:
(A) A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government's payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and
(B) A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.
(c) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall:
(i) Review and revi...

Thoughts on Trump Ending Affirmative Action in Contracting

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