Trump v civil rights
The Trump administration is making a systemic effort to diminish civil rights agencies
President Trump has never been quiet about his plans to reverse some of the stepped-up civil rights enforcement of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and he's doing that in big ways and small, by proposing to cut some civil rights divisions entirely, cutting funding and staff levels, and putting critics in charge of agencies, among other actions. On Tuesday, The Washington Post focused on a few of the moves, including a proposal in the Labor Department's fiscal 2018 budget to eliminate the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and fold it into the separate Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
The compliance program conducts audits for discriminatory practices among federal contractors, and has done so for decades. As the Post's Juliet Eilperin explains in the video below, that affects about a quarter of the U.S. workforce, and the cut is not yet a done deal:
At the Environmental Protection Agency, new leaders have recommended scrapping the environmental justice program, which helps mitigate oil spills, hazardous leaks, and other environmental threats concentrated in minority areas. The Education Department's Office of Civil Rights faces steep budget and staffing cuts, hampering investigations of discrimination in school districts, and its new director, Candice E. Jackson, wrote a book arguing that attempts to promote diverse student bodies disregard "the very real prices paid by individual people who end up injured by affirmative action."
Trump has similarly suggested he wants to put the Justice Department's civil rights division under the leadership of conservative lawyer Eric Dreiband, who has represented several companies in discrimination lawsuits. The Trump Justice Department has already moved to dismantle challenges to a Texas voter ID law and, with the Education Department, rolled back Obama-era guidance about transgender students and bathrooms.
Trump administration officials insist that they believe in civil rights. "The Trump administration has an unwavering commitment to the civil rights of all Americans," White House spokeswoman Kelly Love told The Washington Post. Vanita Gupta, who led the DOJ's civil rights division until January, disagrees. "They can call it a course correction, but there's little question that it's a rollback of civil rights across the board," she said. You can read more at The Washington Post.