By Inez Feltscher Stepman
Monday, June 22, 2026
While the media loudly chase “controversies” like the
president’s White House lawn UFC fight, the Trump administration is moving
quietly to destroy the left’s infrastructure of legal discrimination against
disfavored groups.
At the beginning of this term, President Trump issued an
executive order promising the dissolution of the diversity, equity, and
inclusion (DEI) machine and a restoration of equal justice under the law.
Operationalizing that executive order has meant months of complicated legal and
administrative work that is at last bearing fruit, even as the administration
takes heat over the chaos in the Middle East and more.
At the end of 2025, a quorum was finally restored to the
dormant Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency tasked with
policing workplace discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. Now with it up
and running in its own independent capacity alongside Harmeet Dhillon’s Civil
Rights Division of the Department of Justice, the administration is finally
turning its big guns on the blatantly illegal discrimination in the name of
diversity that has become the public norm.
Following the success of investigations against
universities and medical schools for clear racial discrimination in
admissions forbidden by the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision
in 2023, the Trump administration has found post-racial-reckoning America a
target-rich environment both inside and outside the government itself.
For example, the DOJ has joined the 1776 Foundation in suing the Los Angeles Unified
School District for instituting a racially structured funding system, which
eliminated schools for contention for additional dollars if they happen to be
more than 30 percent white. Additionally, the DOJ has asked a federal court to
halt the country’s first reparations program in Illinois, which has handed out $7 million in city money to people on the basis
of race as supposed restitution for housing discrimination.
The push against this modern round of racial
discrimination hasn’t been limited to the DOJ; just last week the Small
Business Administration proposed a rulemaking that would end racial preferences in
federal contracting. The proposal not only curbs the SBA’s longstanding
practice of handing out race-based loan benefits; it also eliminates a major
source of fraud.
As a capstone, the Office of Legal Counsel has issued an opinion
declaring the doctrine of disparate impact unconstitutional. According to the
OLC, disparate-impact liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
“fosters the very discrimination its guidelines seek to address.”
It is hard to overstate the importance of these moves.
Disparate impact is the legal arm of the left’s “systemic
racism” charge against the United States: discrimination as a kind of “God of
the gaps” that explains why in virtually no part of life we see the perfectly
population-proportional racial representation the left wants as a baseline. As
University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot has cleverly written, this interpretation of civil rights law makes
“almost everything presumptively illegal,” leaving the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission under previous administrations free pick its private
sector victims at will. The EEOC has, for example, severely circumscribed the
use of various aptitude tests for hiring, but never forbidden the use of
college degrees, despite the fact that college degree requirements also have a
“disparate impact.”
A typical leftist use of disparate impact can be found in
a case the Biden EEOC brought against the gas station chain
Sheetz. In its hiring process, Sheetz screened out those with certain kinds of
felony convictions. This commonsense procedure earned the company an EEOC
lawsuit, alleging that because more job applicants of black and Native-American
background had those convictions, the process itself, though neutral on its
face, was discriminatory. At no point did the government even attempt to allege
that Sheetz was trying to discriminate against black and Native-American
job seekers; the fact that their process had a racially disproportionate outcome
was enough to infer discrimination. That lawsuit was dropped by the Trump EEOC
last summer.
This term, the EEOC is instead pursuing companies
suspected of practicing what the Civil Rights Act was trying to prevent: overt
discrimination against applicants and employees because of the color of their
skin.
In what will likely be the first lawsuit of many, the
Trump EEOC has sued the New York Times for allegedly failing to
promote a white male employee because of his race. In sharp contrast with the
Sheetz case, the EEOC points to publicly stated goals and action plans to
increase female and non-white representation at the paper that led to passing
over a white applicant. In the Trump administration, under both the letter and
the spirit of the law, there will be “no diversity exception” — Chair Andrea
Lucas’s words — to colorblind meritocracy.
For decades now, the logic behind lawsuits like the one
against Sheetz has buttressed corporate America’s internal leftward cultural
leanings to institutionalize nothing less than a widespread regime of
discrimination against white males, alongside disfavored minorities like
Asians.
Chief Justice John Roberts once famously wrote that “the
way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on
the basis of race.” That this slew of recent actions from the administration
will probably face legal challenges from the left tees up the Supreme Court to
fully enforce that simple promise of equality under the law, one that is
popular even among Democrats.
The competent and aggressive work of the Trump
administration on this issue may not be grabbing headlines, but it’s essential
to restoring the most basic American promise: a fair shot based on merit. Under
Trump II, without fanfare, more progress is being made toward that ideal than
has ever been made in our lifetimes.
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