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President Donald Trump has revoked a decades-old executive order designed to combat workplace discrimination by federal contractors.
On Wednesday (January 22), Trump nuked Executive Order 11246 which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity in federal hiring, per HuffPost. Signed a year after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the landmark labor standard dated back to Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency. The rule explicitly required federal employers to take "affirmative action" to not discriminate against job applicants or workers.
Trump on Wednesday attacked the longtime labor standard as "radical DEI." The president noted that the Labor Department would be prohibited from “pushing contractors to balance their workforce based on race, sex, gender identity, sexual preference, or religion.” Trump described his order to revoke the rule as “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.”
As of Wednesday, the Labor Department called Johnson's executive order a “historic step towards equal employment opportunity” and "a major safeguard” for millions of workers, per its website.
“Signed by President Johnson that early autumn Friday in 1965, Executive Order 11246 became a key landmark in a series of federal actions aimed at ending racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination, an effort that dated back to the anxious days before the U.S. was thrust into World War II,” the site reads.
Judy Conti of the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, said Trump nuked a “key tool” in combating workplace discrimination.
“This is not a return to so-called ‘meritocracy,’” Conti said in a statement. “Rather, it’s an attempted return to the days when people of color, women, and other marginalized people lacked the tools to ensure that they were evaluated on their merits.”
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