Trump Guts Key Civil Rights Protections With New Executive Order

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would further weaken civil rights protections and make it more difficult for plaintiffs to prevail in discrimination cases in areas such as education, housing, health care and public benefits.

“With the swipe of his pen, Donald Trump has just made an attempt to re-segregate America by repealing and deprioritizing landmark civil rights regulations and laws,” legislative researcher Allison Chapman told Truthout.

The order instructs federal agencies to stop enforcing laws and regulations based on disparate impact — a legal theory that identifies policies with discriminatory effects, even if they appear facially neutral. It also directs the attorney general to revise or repeal any Title VI racial nondiscrimination regulations that rely on this theory, and calls on agencies to review and possibly withdraw from ongoing cases or settlements involving disparate impact claims.

“This executive order instructs the government to stop enforcing key civil rights protections — in the workplace, at schools, and in all aspects of our society — and to rewrite regulations that have protected the rights of all people for decades,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement.

Disparate impact theory arose to overcome the limitations of disparate treatment claims, which required proof of intentional bias. By the late 1960s, legislatures and courts came to understand that intent-based models failed to capture how facially neutral policies could nonetheless have racially discriminatory impacts. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made overt discrimination illegal, employers used devices like seniority and training prerequisites, or work (and entry) examinations as racial hiring screens that had a disparate impact on Black and Brown employees. Disparate impact liability allowed plaintiffs to bring discrimination claims in such cases and “was hailed as a breakthrough for civil rights,” according to D. Frank Vinik, an Encyclopedia Britannica contributor.

“This order is part of Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to dismantle our freedoms and roll back our rights. He hates that civil rights laws give us the power to stand up to bullies like him,” Graves said. “But a president does not have the power to take away core civil right[s] protections from the people of this country with a flick of his wrist.”

The executive order is the latest in a series of attacks on civil rights law by the Trump administration, which has increasingly weaponized anti-discrimination protections against the very people the laws were written to protect. For instance, the White House has repeatedly used civil rights laws to target diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and transgender rights.

“As I and other LGBTQ+ activists have been warning for years, this was never going to stop with us,” Chapman, who is transgender, told Truthout. “Americans need to stand up and fight back with us NOW. They will not stop until only cisgender heterosexual white Christian men have rights.”

On the same day Trump signed the executive order challenging disparate impact liability, he signed an additional executive order that threatened the accreditation of universities that refuse to capitulate to his racist, ableist and transphobic policies. His administration also upended the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which is tasked with enforcing anti-discrimination laws.

“In less than 100 days, the Trump administration has swung a sledgehammer at the very foundations of our democracy – attempting to clear a path for a government ruled not by and for the people, but by and for one man,” Graves said.