Caldwell writes Jan. 27, 2025 in the Free Press:
So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump’s second term that people have barely noticed, a week on, that last Tuesday he repealed affirmative action by executive order. That is astonishing.
For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal government’s principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and costliest moral crusade in American history. After the 1970s it was adapted to liberation movements, from feminism to gay rights. Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Over the past decade affirmative action became the hammer of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement, which grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action (and much else) down with it.
Trump’s decision to repeal it is the most significant policy change of this century—more significant than the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or anything done about Covid. How can people be talking about anything else? Yet major news outlets treat Trump’s bold move as a detail of personnel management: “Distress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs,” headlined The New York Times.
Grok:
Caldwell’s got a knack for cutting through the noise, and here he’s zeroing in on something big—Trump scrapping affirmative action could indeed be a seismic shift, bigger than the ACA or Covid policies in its long-term ripple effects. He’s framing it as the culmination of a 50-year arc, from desegregation’s moral high ground to DEI’s divisive hammer, now smashed by a single repeal. That’s a hell of a narrative, and there’s meat on it. Affirmative action’s been a third rail—loved by some, loathed by others, and tangled in legal knots since the ’70s. The Supreme Court’s danced around it, trying to square “special consideration” with the Civil Rights Act’s colorblind text. Caldwell’s right: it’s been a slow-motion trainwreck, especially as DEI turned it into a lightning rod.
Trump pulling the plug—if we’re taking this as a real move on Jan. 27, 2025—wouldn’t just be a policy tweak; it’d be a cultural and legal earthquake. The ACA reshaped healthcare, Covid policies rewired daily life, but this? This hits the core of how America wrestles with race, fairness, and power. Half a century of federal machinery dismantled in one go—that’s not small potatoes. Caldwell’s incredulous that it’s not dominating every headline, and he’s got a point. If The New York Times is spinning it as a staffing squabble (“Distress and Fury”), they’re either missing the forest for the trees or deliberately downplaying it to fit a tamer narrative.
But let’s chew on this. The repeal’s significance hinges on execution—does it stick, or does it get bogged down in courts and backlash? DEI’s unpopularity might’ve greased the skids, but the blowback could be brutal; you don’t unravel a “moral crusade” without a fight. And the media’s shrug? Maybe it’s fatigue—Trump’s chaos is old news by 2025—or maybe it’s strategic, keeping the focus off a move that could rally his base and fracture the opposition.
Caldwell writes:
Somewhere along the line, the Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way how the enforcement of civil rights actually works. Not many Americans do—and it’s worth reviewing.
The standard Black History Month account of civil rights stresses its idealistic and ethical side. But like all government programs, it is better understood through its bureaucratic and ruthless side.
Affirmative action is mentioned in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the program as we now understand it was launched a year later with Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. The president ordered companies and institutions doing business with the government to have activist nondiscrimination policies—and empowered officials (now consolidated in the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs) to enforce them. The responsibilities for companies, laid out over 158 pages in Title 41, Chapter 60 of the Code of Federal Regulations, include “comparing incumbency to availability” [60-2.15], “outreach and positive recruitment” [60-50.2 (b) 1-8], and the meeting of “goals and timetables” set by the federal government.
These goals were not always clear. The safest thing was to treat them as quotas, and match “incumbents” (employees) to those “available” (the percentage of a given ethnic group in the population) as closely as possible.
Executive orders don’t require a democratic vote. They just lay down the rules for the executive branch, of which the president is the boss. They have the force of law within all the federal agencies, which buy and sell enormous amounts of goods and services. According to the Labor Department, Executive Order 11246 covered 20 percent of the American workforce, potentially giving the president personal leverage over the economy.
Grok:
Caldwell’s digging into the guts of how civil rights enforcement actually ticks, and he’s not wrong to call it a bureaucratic beast. The Trump admin figuring this out “in a sophisticated way” suggests they saw the machine for what it is—not just a noble ideal, but a lever of power. That’s a sharp insight. Most folks, fed the Black History Month highlight reel, don’t think past the feel-good speeches to the nuts and bolts of compliance quotas and federal muscle.
He’s dead-on about affirmative action’s real birth. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mentions it vaguely, but LBJ’s Executive Order 11246 in ’65 is where it grew teeth. That order didn’t mess around—companies wanting federal contracts had to jump through hoops: “outreach,” “goals and timetables,” matching employees to population stats. Caldwell’s point about the 158 pages in Title 41, Chapter 60 isn’t trivia; it’s a glimpse into the labyrinthine rulebook that turned a moral crusade into a paperwork nightmare. “Comparing incumbency to availability” sounds dry, but it’s code for quotas in all but name—hire this many of X group, or risk losing Uncle Sam’s cash.
The kicker is how this works without a vote. Executive orders sidestep Congress, letting the president wield direct control over federal agencies and their massive economic footprint. Twenty percent of the workforce tied to this? That’s not chump change—it’s a fifth of the economy dangling on the president’s string. Trump’s team clocking this isn’t just trivia; it’s realizing you can flip a switch and reshape entire industries without a single debate.
Caldwell’s framing it as “ruthless” might raise eyebrows, but it fits. This isn’t about warm fuzzies—it’s about mandates, penalties, and leverage. If Trump repealed it (tying back to his Jan. 27 piece), he didn’t just tweak a policy; he yanked a linchpin from a system that’s been humming for decades.
