Only 44 years after the Carter Administration junked the civil service exam because of disparate impact, the White House is trying to get out from under the Luevano Consent Decree.
The story of the tests is kind of heart warming. The people seeking a new test must have believed that if cultural bias were removed they could get equal proportions, aaaaaand the people in the departments, who actually have to suffer the consequences of knucklehead underlings, stuck to their guns. Nice on both counts.
Are government jobs meant to provide good service to the citizens or are they mostly a make work program for people who can't make it in the private sector?
Why not both? We could have the real government jobs filled by people who do well on the new test and then create a bunch of 'handicapable hands' type departments and fill them with the enthusiastic low scorers.
We could even send unemployed white actors in to ask for help occasionally so the people in that department can enjoy fucking with them.
Honestly, even when they inevitably found out, I don't think they'd mind.
Government jobs were definitely not for people who couldn’t make it elsewhere in Canada during my era (retired 11 years ago). There were no blacks, main other ethnicity was Chinese/Korean.
I worked on a contract at the VA years ago. One of the lifers told me several times that 'good enough for government work' was originally coined as a compliment, i.e. work meeting rigorous and specific standards. Governments can perform well if they don't lower their standards like this, or become corrupt like, well, everywhere eventually.
Unfortunately, even if DoJ wins, they can't make it retroactive, so PG County MD won't riot.
I took an exam in Jan '79 for a Federal summer job as a clerk/typist for the part of DoEnergy that made the gas crisis that summer much worse with price controls and rationing. The Administrator wore sandals and took the bus to work, where he had a govt car--with a phone!
The guy who created the emergency allocation form for wholesale diesel distributors went on vacation for weeks, and no one else could or would answer their questions, so we clerks would transfer anxious callers around the building until they gave up.
"The guy who created the emergency allocation form for wholesale diesel distributors went on vacation for weeks, and no one else could or would answer their questions, so we clerks would transfer anxious callers around the building until they gave up."
In that vein, I remember waiting for the DMV office in West Haverstraw, Rockland County to open on a cold winter morning around 40 years ago. When the woman who opened arrived, fashionably late of course, the very first thing she did, even before she took off her coat was to take the phone off the hook.
> "the DMV office in West Haverstraw, Rockland County"
I don't remember if it was that exact DMV office, but on one occasion when I had to get my NY State license in a hurry, I went into a DMV office near there thinking it would be faster than the more urban NYC offices.
Entering the door, I was immediately confronted by a cinematic hellscape of dysfunction with an overhanging LED display showing a triple-digit waiting time.
Before insta-PTSD could set in, I backed out, returned to my car and drove 90 minutes upstate to a small town where I knew one of the DMV ladies. Despite the three hour round trip, I saved time and trauma at that small town office where I was licensed in minutes with a smile and a wave.
Have you ever needed to get one of those "International Driver's Licenses"? AAA will produce one for you and lemme tell ya, it was a shocker. I walk up to the counter, fill out a short form, the AAA lady takes that plus my California driver's license and before she walks away I ask, "When should I come back for this?" expecting to hear "in a week" or "in a month". Answer: oh, I'll have it for you in ten minutes.
OT but anyone else notice that Ron Unz has taken over Steve's column there, using it to tout his latest asshattery?
Funny that story about the clerks, the old transfer phone-tag lose the customer via attrition. Today we have call centers in The Philippines and India to handle unruly customers.
I think it was Dalrymple in Taki Mag who, while in Haiti, wanted a patient's health records. The clerk began looking through ALL records from start to finish. In other words, there was no order, alphabetical or otherwise, to patient records.
So Steve, are you suggesting that if the Trump Administration successfully manages to scrap the Luevano Decree, that they would return to using the pre-1981 Civil Service Test that had been used for well over a century for hiring all federal government hires?
Also suppose the Trump Administration attempted to restore the pre-1981 civil service test (or at least a similar updated version of it), would the liberals just take this lying down, or would they fight Trump tooth and nail over this as they’ve been doing on nearly everything that he proposes regarding government policy?
Democrats are kind of stumped at present by Trump's anti-DEI moves because they've decided that the Worst Thing in the World is to mention that whites tend to be smarter than blacks. So if everybody is equal, then what do we need affirmative action for? During the Great Awokening, they simply emphasized how evil white people are, but that got old. So now what?
Two men enter, one man leave. Or in today's vernacular, " two peoples enter, though they're obviously different, but at the same time equal, shall discourse physically".
Then you'll get a civil service more like the one here in Hong Kong.
HK's civil servants are, by world standards, pretty good. Most quotidian government functions here are reliable, and some are reasonably speedy. Civil service jobs have traditionally been considered a good deal here, with very competitive salaries and tremendous perks, so theoretically there should be a lot of capable people working for the government.
But that doesn't mean it's efficient overall. There are plenty of government-related functions that are still agonizingly sclerotic, and there's widespread evidence of rigidity in the way civil servants handle any task or request that's out of the ordinary, and of tunnel vision in the decisions they make.
Like a war that cannot be won, let's just declare victory over inequality, all are equal, yay. Now we can work on fitting people into positions for which they are suited.
Tricky given a multiethnic society. Malaysia has affirmative action for its own people to maintain the balance given the disparity in ability between two types of Asians.
Frankly I think the best thing is to develop some expansive concept of 'whiteness' (perhaps without the name, 'Americanness' or something) that encompasses mostly-European Latinos and Wasians. Then you have a market-dominant majority again (h/t Amy Chua) and can start trying to dismantle the ethnic favoritism blocs. But you'll probably always have some set-aside for black people given the history of slavery.
Some sort of set-aside for "foundational Blacks" as some slave-descended Americans call themselves seems fair. Similar to the Malays qualifying as "bumiputera" (indigenous to the Malay peninsula) so as to justify the handouts and favourable policies they are entitled to.
This is obviously good and I have enjoyed seeing a fair amount of DEI getting tossed, although obviously it will live on in different guises and new department descriptions.
That said, a sustained and successful assault on DEI does mean a smaller black middle to upper middle class. We should be thinking a bit about what effect this will have on our politics, culture, and livability of areas where this pullback will be most strongly felt.
I agree, what I am saying is that partial removal of this crutch means even more downwardly mobile blacks and the implications that has for social disorder and economic stagnation in the areas in which they make up a significant share of the population and/or does it mean they start leaving higher cost areas (say like PG County) they can no longer afford and move to exurban ones and alter those communities?
There used to be a substantial and sustainable black middle-to-upper-middle class that earned its position by merit.
Unfortunately, that was back in the "bad old days" [sic] of segregation (de jure and de facto) from the 1860s to the 1960s, when blacks mostly led and lived in their own parallel society within America, and some blacks naturally had the professional and managerial roles within it.
Then someone got the notion that free association, where blacks preferred blacks and whites preferred whites, was the WORST THING EVER and force-integrated that historical black society into the white majority, which put the black middle to upper-middle class into immediate competition with the larger white (and now Asian) middle to upper-middle class with perfectly foreseeable consequences (foreseeable to anyone except to the liberals who trashed the Constitution to end free association and force-integrate everyone).
Having demolished the organic black middle to upper-middle class, embarrassed liberals decided to create a simulacrum black middle to upper-middle class to flatter their own vanity and as a sop to the blacks whose livelihoods they were ruining. This involved further subverting the Constitution with a de facto Zeroth Amendment that blacks always have to get at least as much of everything as everyone else irrespective of merit or circumstance.
Thus was the old self-sustaining black middle class native to the black community replaced with a Potemkin black middle class of affirmative action penalty-immune DEI hires riddling every institution and organization to everyone's detriment.
The whole tragedy could have been avoided by the simple expedient of ignoring prating liberals or by placing them in THEIR native environment: insane asylums. Oops, the liberals got rid of those too!
All true, and the destruction of the self-sustaining black middle class means that there is really no social mechanism in place to guide the portion of the artificial black middle class that is going to find itself going backwards. So while I am personally opposed to DEI and am glad it is being rolled back, I think there is a decent chance black social pathologies are about to get even worse.
Cities with significant black populations have generally been pretty averse to policing the behavior of such an important constituency (I live in one), and at a local level I think the politics of catering to black sensibilities could even increase since they are one-party political units where blacks pay a massively outsized role. That could also spur a bit of a backlash or at least deliberate neglect at the state and possibly federal level as well. Probably a reason to bet against further gentrification of Rust Belt and Southern cities and bank on increased white flight to the suburbs as people form families. Urban political leadership is not going to cater to the desires of the middle to upper class whites they really need but don't have, they will just respond to the downwardly mobile minorities they already do.
You've got it right. I think black pathologies will get worse. With a 73 % illegitimacy rate, how can black families improve. It is a downward cycle. The rap culture makes it even worse.
The main positive of a more ethnically diverse America is that the share of the population that is sympathetic to blacks and will go along with their demands for more subsidy and lower standards is steadily shrinking. Obviously there are places like MD that will never learn, but in other locations they are going to be treated with far less deference than has been the case for several generations.
I think they are just going to get really bad. I don't see how we as a country avoid a generation of fiscal austerity, so there will be less federal and state money to support them and obviously local tax revenue will be weak. It's possible this results in downward pressure on the birth rate at the bottom, since what makes a lot of the current level possible are social welfare subsidies that will almost certainly get less generous. But to more directly answer your question, yes they will have less resources and neighboring communities will do what they can to wall them off - limit access to schools, use zoning to keep the cost of renting/buying high, aggressive policing, etc.
It's going to be rough but on the other hand perhaps it will force some positive cultural changes. The way black dysfunction has been indulged and papered over for the last 3-4 generations certainly hasn't worked.
The issue with DEI is when anyone is elected to being a school board member, the new member gets to see the raw data on test results, graduation rates, discipline and gets to see the real racial and gender gaps.
When one says, get rid of DIE, then one is saying that any achievement gap is due to nature and not nurture even though the U.S. has 100's of years of history of discriminating against everyone who is/was a non-white male.
As an example, is Title IX in education part of DEI?
Boo hoo. The intelligent rise to the top and the stupid fall to the bottom. America would be a wilderness of barbaric Indians if not for the white man who made a world out of forests.
Off topic Steve-O, but could you do a post on the Muslim/Asian takeover of Texas? I was in Dallas a few months ago and was blown away by those groups’ numbers and how they had taken over whole neighborhoods and, seemingly, towns. Seems like a big story, maybe related somewhat to the California exodus of Silicon Valley types? It’s becoming a thing on twitter but there’s been no serious reporting on it.
Maybe you can kick it off with a 30-word précis for non-Texans? Do Muslims and Asians work together or is it a hi-lo alliance? Certain types of Muslims and Asians? Methods and locations? Etc.
It's not a terrible idea, and would have been a good one 40 or even 30 years ago. Fire all the DEI hires and get competent people chosen by an actual civil service exam in, as was the case before the 60s or so. 'Good enough for government work' used to actually mean good.
Problem is:
1. The Democrats are wise to this sort of thing and would just pull a second DOGE (Department Underlining Complete Equity? I kid) and fire everyone hired under the Trump administration.
2. It's going to be very hard to attract quality people to government positions from now on. You don't actually want the move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley types in a civil service, you want boring rule-follower types who execute procedures correctly. But competent people of either type are not going to be interested now that the principal attraction of a government job--security--is no longer there. Even the parts of the government that worked well are going to work less well from now on.
Speaking of exams, has anyone else been getting the strange arithmetic series of equations (11+8=?) quiz that keeps popping up in my X feed tonight? I believe I came up with the right answer that only one other sucker did.
The State department still has the FSOA, which is a pretty comprehensive test and notoriously difficult for single subject people. I always assumed they skated past the ban due to being FS instead of GS employees, the way that the DoD can also test raw intelligence, due to being in a different framework from the civil service
It now has been diluted with biographical self-rating sections, the main purpose of which is likely to support the rigged conclusions in the final recruitment phase where candidates who have passed the initial gauntlet go to Washington where State Department officials can get a good look at their skin color and ethnicity and draw opaque but mysteriously DEI-ish conclusions about their suitability to carry out US foreign policy.
The IQ and history-knowledge sections of the exam process still put a floor under selection, so there are few pure Bantoids in the final mix, but there are a huge number of anyone-but-whites.
It is interesting that the Democratic Party was so openly anti-white as far back as the mid-70s when the nation was still 80 % white. Jimmy Carter was the perfect cover for the anti-white apparatus of the Democratic Party. He was a white, evangelical Southerner in a time when the Democrats were the party of choice due to some Yankee misadventures in the 1860s. Carter was a diabolical man. Rest in Peace, villain.
Another key aspect of federal civil servants is that they are usually the children, counsins, nieces and nephews of other civil service. Trying to apply for a government job with no one who has gone through the system means a low probability of being hired.
The other issue is that one needs a job to get a federal job. The processes is so slow that anyone who truly is unemployed can't wait for the process to finish.
And in the DC area (or other heavily federal government depend area) there are the people who spend their careers working for government contractors. If one has not worked for the government or had a relative work as a federal contractor, getting hired and maintaining employment can be very confusing.
Though Ed Martin is the temporary (nominated for permanent) US Attorney for DC, he is a St. Louis native. And I met him in passing a couple times years ago. E
It depends on the position. There are civil service positions where incompetence would be a good thing
The story of the tests is kind of heart warming. The people seeking a new test must have believed that if cultural bias were removed they could get equal proportions, aaaaaand the people in the departments, who actually have to suffer the consequences of knucklehead underlings, stuck to their guns. Nice on both counts.
Are government jobs meant to provide good service to the citizens or are they mostly a make work program for people who can't make it in the private sector?
Why not both? We could have the real government jobs filled by people who do well on the new test and then create a bunch of 'handicapable hands' type departments and fill them with the enthusiastic low scorers.
We could even send unemployed white actors in to ask for help occasionally so the people in that department can enjoy fucking with them.
Honestly, even when they inevitably found out, I don't think they'd mind.
Government jobs were definitely not for people who couldn’t make it elsewhere in Canada during my era (retired 11 years ago). There were no blacks, main other ethnicity was Chinese/Korean.
I worked on a contract at the VA years ago. One of the lifers told me several times that 'good enough for government work' was originally coined as a compliment, i.e. work meeting rigorous and specific standards. Governments can perform well if they don't lower their standards like this, or become corrupt like, well, everywhere eventually.
Unfortunately, even if DoJ wins, they can't make it retroactive, so PG County MD won't riot.
I took an exam in Jan '79 for a Federal summer job as a clerk/typist for the part of DoEnergy that made the gas crisis that summer much worse with price controls and rationing. The Administrator wore sandals and took the bus to work, where he had a govt car--with a phone!
The guy who created the emergency allocation form for wholesale diesel distributors went on vacation for weeks, and no one else could or would answer their questions, so we clerks would transfer anxious callers around the building until they gave up.
"The guy who created the emergency allocation form for wholesale diesel distributors went on vacation for weeks, and no one else could or would answer their questions, so we clerks would transfer anxious callers around the building until they gave up."
In that vein, I remember waiting for the DMV office in West Haverstraw, Rockland County to open on a cold winter morning around 40 years ago. When the woman who opened arrived, fashionably late of course, the very first thing she did, even before she took off her coat was to take the phone off the hook.
> "the DMV office in West Haverstraw, Rockland County"
I don't remember if it was that exact DMV office, but on one occasion when I had to get my NY State license in a hurry, I went into a DMV office near there thinking it would be faster than the more urban NYC offices.
Entering the door, I was immediately confronted by a cinematic hellscape of dysfunction with an overhanging LED display showing a triple-digit waiting time.
Before insta-PTSD could set in, I backed out, returned to my car and drove 90 minutes upstate to a small town where I knew one of the DMV ladies. Despite the three hour round trip, I saved time and trauma at that small town office where I was licensed in minutes with a smile and a wave.
Have you ever needed to get one of those "International Driver's Licenses"? AAA will produce one for you and lemme tell ya, it was a shocker. I walk up to the counter, fill out a short form, the AAA lady takes that plus my California driver's license and before she walks away I ask, "When should I come back for this?" expecting to hear "in a week" or "in a month". Answer: oh, I'll have it for you in ten minutes.
OT but anyone else notice that Ron Unz has taken over Steve's column there, using it to tout his latest asshattery?
Funny that story about the clerks, the old transfer phone-tag lose the customer via attrition. Today we have call centers in The Philippines and India to handle unruly customers.
'Thanks for taking the Bus....Jimmy Carter'
Still remember the rear window signs on Greyhound (?) buses.
When I think highly effective civil service, I immediately think of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa!
Are we thinking of RWDS Latin America or siesta-under-sombrero Latin America?
I think it was Dalrymple in Taki Mag who, while in Haiti, wanted a patient's health records. The clerk began looking through ALL records from start to finish. In other words, there was no order, alphabetical or otherwise, to patient records.
Like.. alphabetisation had never occurred to anyone working there?! Christ
So Steve, are you suggesting that if the Trump Administration successfully manages to scrap the Luevano Decree, that they would return to using the pre-1981 Civil Service Test that had been used for well over a century for hiring all federal government hires?
Also suppose the Trump Administration attempted to restore the pre-1981 civil service test (or at least a similar updated version of it), would the liberals just take this lying down, or would they fight Trump tooth and nail over this as they’ve been doing on nearly everything that he proposes regarding government policy?
Democrats are kind of stumped at present by Trump's anti-DEI moves because they've decided that the Worst Thing in the World is to mention that whites tend to be smarter than blacks. So if everybody is equal, then what do we need affirmative action for? During the Great Awokening, they simply emphasized how evil white people are, but that got old. So now what?
Indeed, but I shudder to think what’s coming next
Two men enter, one man leave. Or in today's vernacular, " two peoples enter, though they're obviously different, but at the same time equal, shall discourse physically".
They pitch it as straight reparations. That's kind of what Ta-Nehisi Coates was going for.
I hate to say it, but if we go into a stagflation, the Democrats are going to have a *lot* of leeway and the vibes will shift back just as fast.
Them the breaks. Hopefully post midterms.
The college bias lawsuits were in the mill for--what?--10 years.
And had to wait for a sympathetic Supreme Court.
What happens if Asian study-grinds "game" the Trump Civil-Service Exam?
How would they do that? I don’t know how the test works.
Then you'll get a civil service more like the one here in Hong Kong.
HK's civil servants are, by world standards, pretty good. Most quotidian government functions here are reliable, and some are reasonably speedy. Civil service jobs have traditionally been considered a good deal here, with very competitive salaries and tremendous perks, so theoretically there should be a lot of capable people working for the government.
But that doesn't mean it's efficient overall. There are plenty of government-related functions that are still agonizingly sclerotic, and there's widespread evidence of rigidity in the way civil servants handle any task or request that's out of the ordinary, and of tunnel vision in the decisions they make.
The history of India Civil Service Exam (and the annex history of forced marriage of the winners) is a cautionary tale.
Like a war that cannot be won, let's just declare victory over inequality, all are equal, yay. Now we can work on fitting people into positions for which they are suited.
Tricky given a multiethnic society. Malaysia has affirmative action for its own people to maintain the balance given the disparity in ability between two types of Asians.
Frankly I think the best thing is to develop some expansive concept of 'whiteness' (perhaps without the name, 'Americanness' or something) that encompasses mostly-European Latinos and Wasians. Then you have a market-dominant majority again (h/t Amy Chua) and can start trying to dismantle the ethnic favoritism blocs. But you'll probably always have some set-aside for black people given the history of slavery.
The set-aside is big city guvmint jobs and rural Southern black-majority county guvmint jobs. Well-paying jobs with little accountability.
The DMV, right.
I still would rather have smart people collecting economic data and tracking infectious diseases on top of that. Oh well.
Some sort of set-aside for "foundational Blacks" as some slave-descended Americans call themselves seems fair. Similar to the Malays qualifying as "bumiputera" (indigenous to the Malay peninsula) so as to justify the handouts and favourable policies they are entitled to.
This is obviously good and I have enjoyed seeing a fair amount of DEI getting tossed, although obviously it will live on in different guises and new department descriptions.
That said, a sustained and successful assault on DEI does mean a smaller black middle to upper middle class. We should be thinking a bit about what effect this will have on our politics, culture, and livability of areas where this pullback will be most strongly felt.
Right. But nobody is allowed to discuss why blacks can't get along without affirmative action.
I agree, what I am saying is that partial removal of this crutch means even more downwardly mobile blacks and the implications that has for social disorder and economic stagnation in the areas in which they make up a significant share of the population and/or does it mean they start leaving higher cost areas (say like PG County) they can no longer afford and move to exurban ones and alter those communities?
They're not going back to the farm, or whatever they called it.
A lot of Prince George's County have moved to black flight Charles County.
There used to be a substantial and sustainable black middle-to-upper-middle class that earned its position by merit.
Unfortunately, that was back in the "bad old days" [sic] of segregation (de jure and de facto) from the 1860s to the 1960s, when blacks mostly led and lived in their own parallel society within America, and some blacks naturally had the professional and managerial roles within it.
Then someone got the notion that free association, where blacks preferred blacks and whites preferred whites, was the WORST THING EVER and force-integrated that historical black society into the white majority, which put the black middle to upper-middle class into immediate competition with the larger white (and now Asian) middle to upper-middle class with perfectly foreseeable consequences (foreseeable to anyone except to the liberals who trashed the Constitution to end free association and force-integrate everyone).
Having demolished the organic black middle to upper-middle class, embarrassed liberals decided to create a simulacrum black middle to upper-middle class to flatter their own vanity and as a sop to the blacks whose livelihoods they were ruining. This involved further subverting the Constitution with a de facto Zeroth Amendment that blacks always have to get at least as much of everything as everyone else irrespective of merit or circumstance.
Thus was the old self-sustaining black middle class native to the black community replaced with a Potemkin black middle class of affirmative action penalty-immune DEI hires riddling every institution and organization to everyone's detriment.
The whole tragedy could have been avoided by the simple expedient of ignoring prating liberals or by placing them in THEIR native environment: insane asylums. Oops, the liberals got rid of those too!
All true, and the destruction of the self-sustaining black middle class means that there is really no social mechanism in place to guide the portion of the artificial black middle class that is going to find itself going backwards. So while I am personally opposed to DEI and am glad it is being rolled back, I think there is a decent chance black social pathologies are about to get even worse.
Cities with significant black populations have generally been pretty averse to policing the behavior of such an important constituency (I live in one), and at a local level I think the politics of catering to black sensibilities could even increase since they are one-party political units where blacks pay a massively outsized role. That could also spur a bit of a backlash or at least deliberate neglect at the state and possibly federal level as well. Probably a reason to bet against further gentrification of Rust Belt and Southern cities and bank on increased white flight to the suburbs as people form families. Urban political leadership is not going to cater to the desires of the middle to upper class whites they really need but don't have, they will just respond to the downwardly mobile minorities they already do.
You've got it right. I think black pathologies will get worse. With a 73 % illegitimacy rate, how can black families improve. It is a downward cycle. The rap culture makes it even worse.
The main positive of a more ethnically diverse America is that the share of the population that is sympathetic to blacks and will go along with their demands for more subsidy and lower standards is steadily shrinking. Obviously there are places like MD that will never learn, but in other locations they are going to be treated with far less deference than has been the case for several generations.
But what happens to the downward trajectory of the black-majority cities and exurbs? They're just left to themselves?
I think they are just going to get really bad. I don't see how we as a country avoid a generation of fiscal austerity, so there will be less federal and state money to support them and obviously local tax revenue will be weak. It's possible this results in downward pressure on the birth rate at the bottom, since what makes a lot of the current level possible are social welfare subsidies that will almost certainly get less generous. But to more directly answer your question, yes they will have less resources and neighboring communities will do what they can to wall them off - limit access to schools, use zoning to keep the cost of renting/buying high, aggressive policing, etc.
It's going to be rough but on the other hand perhaps it will force some positive cultural changes. The way black dysfunction has been indulged and papered over for the last 3-4 generations certainly hasn't worked.
The issue with DEI is when anyone is elected to being a school board member, the new member gets to see the raw data on test results, graduation rates, discipline and gets to see the real racial and gender gaps.
When one says, get rid of DIE, then one is saying that any achievement gap is due to nature and not nurture even though the U.S. has 100's of years of history of discriminating against everyone who is/was a non-white male.
As an example, is Title IX in education part of DEI?
Boo hoo. The intelligent rise to the top and the stupid fall to the bottom. America would be a wilderness of barbaric Indians if not for the white man who made a world out of forests.
Off topic Steve-O, but could you do a post on the Muslim/Asian takeover of Texas? I was in Dallas a few months ago and was blown away by those groups’ numbers and how they had taken over whole neighborhoods and, seemingly, towns. Seems like a big story, maybe related somewhat to the California exodus of Silicon Valley types? It’s becoming a thing on twitter but there’s been no serious reporting on it.
> "the Muslim/Asian takeover of Texas"
Maybe you can kick it off with a 30-word précis for non-Texans? Do Muslims and Asians work together or is it a hi-lo alliance? Certain types of Muslims and Asians? Methods and locations? Etc.
It's not a terrible idea, and would have been a good one 40 or even 30 years ago. Fire all the DEI hires and get competent people chosen by an actual civil service exam in, as was the case before the 60s or so. 'Good enough for government work' used to actually mean good.
Problem is:
1. The Democrats are wise to this sort of thing and would just pull a second DOGE (Department Underlining Complete Equity? I kid) and fire everyone hired under the Trump administration.
2. It's going to be very hard to attract quality people to government positions from now on. You don't actually want the move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley types in a civil service, you want boring rule-follower types who execute procedures correctly. But competent people of either type are not going to be interested now that the principal attraction of a government job--security--is no longer there. Even the parts of the government that worked well are going to work less well from now on.
This is an underappreciated point
Speaking of exams, has anyone else been getting the strange arithmetic series of equations (11+8=?) quiz that keeps popping up in my X feed tonight? I believe I came up with the right answer that only one other sucker did.
https://x.com/musk_news13/status/1909341507083288964
The State department still has the FSOA, which is a pretty comprehensive test and notoriously difficult for single subject people. I always assumed they skated past the ban due to being FS instead of GS employees, the way that the DoD can also test raw intelligence, due to being in a different framework from the civil service
Has it been recentered, inverted like the ATC questionnaire, or do they just ignore the rank order and diversify as much as they dare?
It now has been diluted with biographical self-rating sections, the main purpose of which is likely to support the rigged conclusions in the final recruitment phase where candidates who have passed the initial gauntlet go to Washington where State Department officials can get a good look at their skin color and ethnicity and draw opaque but mysteriously DEI-ish conclusions about their suitability to carry out US foreign policy.
The IQ and history-knowledge sections of the exam process still put a floor under selection, so there are few pure Bantoids in the final mix, but there are a huge number of anyone-but-whites.
A personal encounter with the result here:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-not-so-great-reset-comes-for-the-foreign-service-officers-test/#comment-5449553
It is interesting that the Democratic Party was so openly anti-white as far back as the mid-70s when the nation was still 80 % white. Jimmy Carter was the perfect cover for the anti-white apparatus of the Democratic Party. He was a white, evangelical Southerner in a time when the Democrats were the party of choice due to some Yankee misadventures in the 1860s. Carter was a diabolical man. Rest in Peace, villain.
Another key aspect of federal civil servants is that they are usually the children, counsins, nieces and nephews of other civil service. Trying to apply for a government job with no one who has gone through the system means a low probability of being hired.
The other issue is that one needs a job to get a federal job. The processes is so slow that anyone who truly is unemployed can't wait for the process to finish.
And in the DC area (or other heavily federal government depend area) there are the people who spend their careers working for government contractors. If one has not worked for the government or had a relative work as a federal contractor, getting hired and maintaining employment can be very confusing.
Though Ed Martin is the temporary (nominated for permanent) US Attorney for DC, he is a St. Louis native. And I met him in passing a couple times years ago. E