In a move that could reshape how civil rights law is enforced in America, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order on April 23rd targeting the controversial legal doctrine of disparate impact — and the mainstream media is ignoring its major impact on purpose.
“Disparate-impact” liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.
President Trump spoke with clarity when ending this divisive and illegal left-wing legal principle: “It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals.”
How little coverage has this landmark action received? The New York Times managed to squeeze in a single vague sentence:
“Another restricts the use of the so-called disparate impact rule, which civil rights groups have long said is an important tool for showing discrimination against minorities.”
But don’t be fooled — this is a massive legal policy shift.
The Washington Post says this Executive Order “sets us back decades” when “us” refers to the class of lawyers engaged in litigating racial issues in employment. Vox calls this a “cornerstone” of civil rights enforcement.
The disparate impact doctrine, first cemented into law by the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power decision and later codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act under President George H.W. Bush, allows the federal government to accuse employers of racism not for intentional discrimination, but for hiring practices that produce unequal racial outcomes — even if the practices are neutral and job-related.
This means that even when there isn’t a specific complaint about a racial incident, an allegation can be made simply because one racial group is impacted differently than another.
One of the most notorious examples of the federal government weaponizing disparate impact theory came in the Ricci v. DeStefano case. In 2009, New Haven, Connecticut threw out the results of a firefighter promotion exam because no Black candidates passed—despite the test being job-related and race-neutral. The city preemptively invalidated the results out of fear of a disparate impact lawsuit, effectively punishing high-scoring white and Hispanic firefighters simply for their race. The Supreme Court rightly ruled 5-4 that this violated civil rights law—but the case exposed how civil rights enforcement had become racially discriminatory in the name of anti-discrimination.
Then there is EEOC v. Freeman, a 2013 case where the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a private employer for using criminal background checks and credit history in its hiring process. The EEOC alleged that these common-sense screening tools had a disparate impact on minority applicants. The case was ultimately thrown out, with the judge blasting the EEOC’s data as “rife with analytical errors.”
The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project case is another eye-opener. Texas was sued for issuing low-income housing tax credits too frequently in minority-populated areas. The lawsuit didn’t allege intentional racism—it claimed that the result of a race-neutral policy led to “too many” Black people living near each other. The Supreme Court narrowly upheld the idea that ‘disparate impact’ claims are valid under the Fair Housing Act, warning courts not to allow ideological crusades to override legitimate housing policies. Still, the message was clear: government bureaucrats and activists now treat even geography as suspect if the racial breakdown isn’t “diverse enough.”
In El v. SEPTA, a Pennsylvania man sued the city’s transit agency after being denied a job as a paratransit driver due to a 40-year-old murder conviction. The argument was that minorities have more violent convictions and, therefore, the ability for employers to discriminate against murderers should be thrown out. Though the court ultimately sided with the employer, the fact that such a case reached the appeals court level shows how far the legal system has bent to accommodate the ‘disparate impact’ doctrine. Transit agencies have every right to bar convicted murderers from transporting vulnerable passengers—but even that common-sense policy triggered litigation under civil rights law.
Under disparate impact, intent doesn’t matter. Outcome does. If one racial group scores 20% lower than another on a hiring test, the burden falls on the employer to justify the test’s “business necessity.” Left-wing activists have used this doctrine to radically reshape the American employment markets.
Trump’s Executive Order doesn’t just tweak the rule — it blows a hole in the legal rationale used by the EEOC and left-wing activist groups to shake down businesses and block merit-based standards.
It’s no wonder the corporate press is running scared. This doctrine has been the legal cornerstone of affirmative action-style enforcement for decades, all without ever needing to prove actual discrimination.
This legal field was motivated by the high awards in such cases. The average non-litigation settlement in employment discrimination, measured over 2018-2022 was worth about $30,000. For cases resolved through litigation, the average damages award was about $380,000 over that same period.
And the science never really backed it up. By the time the Griggs ruling came down, serious scholars — including those behind the Coleman Report (1966) and Harvard’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a Senator, who were already raising doubts about the assumption that equal opportunity must yield equal results, and that if they don’t, whether it constitutes proof of racism and racial discrimination.
‘Disparate impact’ means, in its most basic sense, that intent does not matter, only results matter. And if a racial minority had different results, whatever process that led to it was illegal. This also led institutions trying to control results to use irrational methods to try and achieve a quota-based result. If they could not get enough minority applicants to apply to a job, for instance, they would simply not hire anyone. If they could not get the right results, they would punish the innocent people who applied in order to get to the left-wing politically-desired results.
Modern liberals can’t admit that merit-based standards might produce unequal outcomes — because that would mean confronting politically incorrect truths about human differences. Companies have used a variety of methods to try and find merit-based testing that did not yield different results by race.
Trump’s move to finally put disparate impact enforcement under the microscope is long overdue. And the fact that legacy media outlets are pretending it didn’t happen only confirms what we already knew: They can’t defend the far-left legal theory — so they’re hiding the story.
Trump is taking a bold step to restore fairness to businesses and employers and in many other aspects of American life — and the media’s silence speaks volumes.
The post Trump Signs Major Civil Rights Executive Order: “Disparate Impact” Doctrine Faces the Axe in Employment Law, Media Tries to Ignore appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.