April 25, 2025 Story by: Editor
President Trump has taken steps to nullify a key component of the Civil Rights Act as he works to remove policies from the federal government.
One of the executive orders issued Wednesday, dubbed Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy, would dismantle disparate impact liability — a legal theory codified in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that holds agencies accountable for practices that have an outsized discriminatory effect on protected groups, even when there is no intent to discriminate.
“What this is really about is the ability to interrogate inequality,” Janai Nelson, President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, explained on CBS Evening News. “When we see inequality and we see different groups experiencing a law or policy in different ways, we, as a society that believes in fairness and justice, have an obligation to examine that to make sure the results we’re seeing are not based on discrimination or someone’s identity, and that they are, in fact, fair policies. That’s what disparate impact means—it’s the ability to interrogate inequality.”
The theory allows a plaintiff to sue without fulfilling the burden of demonstrating intentional bias by pointing to practices that disproportionately affect protected groups. Some of these practices include educational requirements, criminal history policies, and even physical fitness.
But conservatives have long argued the disparate impact clause punishes employers, an argument Trump’s latest action echoes.
Trump describes disparate impact liability as part of a “pernicious movement” that endangers the “bedrock principle” that all American citizens are treated equally.
“Disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability,” the order reads. “It not only undermines our national values, but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.”
This is an attempt to dismantle our entire civil rights infrastructure,” Nelson said. Gone are the days where someone’s going to say out loud, ‘I want to discriminate against you because you are Black, or a woman, or a person who’s a member of the LGBTQ+ community’. We don’t see smoking guns like that anymore. That doesn’t mean, though, that discrimination is gone—it still exists. And when we see imbalances, when we see inequality, we have a duty to interrogate it.”
The memo adds that disparate impact liability has, in some cases, made it impossible for employers to “use bona fide job-oriented evaluations when recruiting.”
“Because of disparate-impact liability, employers cannot act in the best interests of the job applicant, the employer, and the American public,” Trump wrote in the order.
The president’s executive actions also direct federal agencies to identify and roll back regulations related to disparate impact and review all current lawsuits, investigations, and consent decrees currently based on disparate impact claims. It also calls for departments to work with the attorney general and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to change the interpretation of Title VI and Title VII.
The order falls in line with Trump’s attempts to create a “colorblind” society based on “meritocracy.”
During his inauguration speech, the president vowed to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
Just two days later, he signed an executive order to restore “merit-based opportunity” to federal agencies.
“All Americans benefit from all of us having an equal opportunity to achieve and access opportunities, which makes this country better,” Nelson said. “It’s the reason we can even talk about America’s greatness—it’s because of civil rights laws and protections that remove the barriers that have sidelined so many for generations.”
Source: The Hill
