For nearly five decades, Washington bureaucrats forced federal agencies to pass a secret racial math test before hiring anyone.
This week, Donald Trump's Justice Department declared that test unconstitutional and ordered it erased from the books.
Now the rule Democrats used to police your resume by skin color is gone for good.
DOJ Declares Half Century Old Bias Test Unconstitutional
The rule was called the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures.
Bureaucrats have used it since 1978 to decide whether a hiring test, an interview, or a promotion exam was "fair."
Fair, in this case, never meant merit.
It meant whether the racial breakdown of who got hired matched the racial breakdown of who applied.
If the numbers didn't line up, the employer was presumed guilty until proven innocent.
The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel settled the question on June 9, ruling that the guidelines pressured employers into race based decision making that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The Office of Personnel Management moved fast, stripping every reference to the guidelines out of federal civil service regulations.
OPM Director Scott Kupor told Fox News Digital that "federal hiring should be based on merit, qualifications" and the skills a job actually requires.
Kupor said the rule keeps those job related standards while dumping the legal framework that had been forcing agencies to track applicants by race.
Federal Agencies No Longer Have to Pass the Race Math Test
The guidelines applied to every formal hiring test across the 2.2 million person federal workforce, plus internal promotions and the Reemployment Priority List.
That framework gave the government's own lawyers a built in excuse to demand race conscious hiring in the name of avoiding lawsuits.
The old test even had its own formula, known as the four-fifths rule, which flagged any hiring practice where one racial group's selection rate fell below 80 percent of another group's.
Miss that number and the burden shifted to the employer to prove the test wasn't secretly racist.
The change took effect immediately upon publication, according to Federal News Network.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt flagged the move personally, signaling the White House wants this one noticed.
The theory behind the old rule traces back to a 1971 Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which let plaintiffs win discrimination claims without proving anyone intended to discriminate.
Trump's Justice Department now says that theory was never constitutional in the first place, and it has spent his second term unwinding it everywhere from the Education Department to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Democrats Spent Decades Building a Bias Industry – Trump Just Gutted It
Democrats built an entire enforcement machine on the idea that unequal outcomes prove illegal bias, even when nobody did anything wrong.
That machine let civil rights lawyers sue employers for the crime of giving everyone the same test.
NAACP Legal Defense Fund policy counsel Hamida Labi argues the administration's retreat from disparate-impact enforcement fits a wider pattern of eroding civil-rights protections, proof the left still can't separate equal treatment from guaranteed racial outcomes.
Trump's team isn't asking employers to discriminate against anyone.
They're just refusing to let Washington keep demanding discrimination in reverse to satisfy a decades old statistical formula.
This is the same administration that pulled DEI out of Coast Guard officer commissioning and put universities on notice over race based dorm programs, and this rule fits the same pattern – rip the legal scaffolding out from under DEI so it can't grow back the moment nobody's watching.
Expect lawsuits within the 60 day comment window, and expect Democrats to call this racism while refusing to say the word merit out loud.
Sources:
- Andrew Mark Miller and Kiera McDonald, "Trump admin's push to scrap DEI in federal government takes landmark step with new hiring rule," Fox News, July 30, 2026.
- Ben Smith, "DEI Gets Its Pink Slip: Trump Dumps Race-Based Federal Hiring Rules," RedState, July 30, 2026.
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management, "OPM Removes References to Unlawful Uniform Guidelines From Federal Hiring Regulation," OPM.gov press release, July 2026.
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, "Constitutionality of Disparate-Impact Liability Under Title VII," June 9, 2026.
- Office of Personnel Management, interim final rule, Federal Register, 2026.
