To state what is so painfully obvious by now—Donald Trump’s administration has no idea what it’s doing. Sure, there’s the Steve Bannon modus operandi which involves tearing down anything and everything that currently stands. But the chaos approach isn’t actually a legitimate technique to governing. It seemed as if the one small thing standing between Trump and total destruction might have been career civil servants. After all, even if this horrific and dangerous crew has no experience, Washington is chock full of people who have worked in government for decades and know what they are doing. But sadly and not surprisingly, they aren’t being listened to.
For instance, take this week’s announcement that the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is going to investigate universities for their affirmative action policies that allegedly discriminate against white students. This effort is being housed in the agency’s “front office” where the political appointees work, instead of being led by the career attorneys who would normally handle such investigations. And former Justice Department officials are saying this could be big trouble down the road.
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These former officials warned that a direct line could be drawn from the politicized hirings that got the division in trouble during the George W. Bush administration to a reported internal job posting that requested division attorneys interested in working on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions” submit their resumes by Aug. 9.
John Dunne, assistant attorney general for civil rights under George H.W. Bush, told [Talking Points Memo] that the situation was a “duplicate of what happened in the Bush II administration, when the front office, which was totally politically motivated, disregarded professionals’ opinion on issues when it came to initiating litigation.”
To their credit, it seems as if the career staffers wanted absolutely nothing to do with this impending fiasco. In a town where administrations come and go and transitions are common, a good civil rights lawyer would hopefully know better than to wreck their career on something so radioactive as this. But this strategy of soliciting resumes for this kind of effort is also incredibly inefficient. According to those who have held positions in the division previously, staffing is never done this way. Cases are generally assigned by time, experience and based on the recommendation of senior employees.
“The fact that the front office would be staffing this and doing it by looking at resumes is a big red flag,” Justin Levitt, deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division under Obama, told TPM. “When I was in the Justice Department, I staffed precisely zero cases by asking for resumes and I saw precisely zero cases staffed by looking at resumes.” [...]
“You need resumes if what you really want is to check out where they might have worked before, or what clubs they were part of when they were in law school, all sorts of things that are not proper considerations for making case assignments,” he continued.
This is how people who are completely unqualified end up in positions of power and are able to make policy. While hiring “friends” that are supportive of the administration’s political agenda is common among both Democrats and Republicans, it is conservatives that often hire inexperienced people who simply don’t know what they are doing and have no business in these jobs whatsoever.
During the George W. Bush years, political appointees assumed an expanded role in hiring staff and brought on conservative attorneys who often had little experience working in civil rights law; they were ultimately reprimanded in a report by the DOJ inspector general. Earlier this year, civil rights groups raised similar concerns after conservative legal activists sent Sessions a letter urging him not to leave hiring to “career bureaucrats who are reliably opposed to President Trump’s agenda.”
As it stands, the DOJ is currently only looking at one university affirmative action case—a 2015 complaint which alleges that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American students. But given their tenacity for upholding white supremacy and the fact that they are cherry-picking lawyers to work on this issue, it’s a likely bet that this case won’t be the last.