Share
White House Seeks to Limit Programs That Promote Civil Rights
The White House is taking aggressive steps towards reducing the role of the federal government in fighting discrimination and protecting minorities. It is doing so by cutting budgets, dissolving programs and appointing officials unsympathetic to previous practices. Several examples are noted below and more thoroughly discussed in the Washington Post's article.
- ...disband the Labor Department division that has policed discrimination among federal contractors for four decades, according to the White House’s newly proposed budget.... would fold the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, now home to 600 employees....
- new leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has proposed eliminating its environmental justice program, which addresses pollution that poses health threats specifically concentrated in minority communities
- Under the proposed budget, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights — which has investigated thousands of complaints of discrimination in school districts across the country and set new standards for how colleges should respond to allegations of sexual assault and harassment — would also see significant staffing cuts.
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development...has revoked the guidance to implement a rule ensuring that transgender people can stay at sex-segregated shelters of their choice...,
- ...the Department of Health and Human Services has removed a question about sexual orientation from two surveys of elderly Americans about services offered or funded by the government.
- Trump’s likely selection of Eric S. Dreiband to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division. A former Bush administration official and veteran conservative Washington lawyer, Dreiband has represented several companies that were sued for discrimination.
...Vanita Gupta, who was the head of Justice’s civil rights division from October 2014 to January 2017, said that the administration’s actions have already begun to adversely affect Americans across the country. “They can call it a course correction, but there’s little question that it’s a rollback of civil rights across the board,” said Gupta, who is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.