The Trump administration is conducting a profound revolution in civil rights law. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division announced that it is ending the use of disparate impact in enforcement of Title VI under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This is a huge deal.
“The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination,” said Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. “Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin by any group or organization receiving federal money. On its own, this is a worthy goal to ensure equality before the law and treatment by any organization financially connected to the federal government.
But the Department of Justice has been using disparate impact in its enforcement of Title VI since the 1970s, and this has twisted the meaning of the law so that instead of working to stop direct cases of discrimination, the DOJ completely racialized the legal system.
To a certain extent, the standard of “antiracism” proposed by academic Ibram X. Kendi—whose star has faded considerably in the last few years—was already partially codified into law. Any racial disparity in outcomes could be interpreted by the DOJ as de facto racism.
This interpretation of civil rights law has been used to essentially bludgeon institutions into dropping reasonable standards.
Disparate impact analysis has led to schools dropping standardized testing and programs for gifted students. It’s led to police departments dropping colorblind merit-based exams. It’s prompted fire departments to drop physical fitness standards to ensure that more women could be hired.
In many cases, the use of disparate impact analysis has meant dropping basic, commonsense standards and putting Americans in harm’s way.
For instance, in 2014, the Obama administration’s DOJ issued a “Dear Colleague” letter on school discipline. The policy essentially threatened K-12 schools with a civil rights lawsuit if their school discipline policies affected some racial groups more than others, even if the policies themselves were entirely neutral.
The result was that schools adopted lowered discipline standards and therefore created a chaotic environment in many schools that didn’t allow teachers to control their classrooms. Somewhat ironically, schools with the highest minority student populations were most dramatically affected.
Most dramatically, the discipline standard was modeled after the school system in Broward County, Florida. Because of a reliance on avoiding disparate impact, school discipline standards were dropped. This was not just a problem in aggregate but allowed the troubled Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooter to slip through the cracks and kill his fellow students.
The first Trump administration dropped the Obama discipline standard, but the Biden administration brought it back in 2023. Then Trump ended it again in 2025. That’s some serious whiplash and suggests that a bigger change was necessary for a longer-term shift in policy.
While the first Trump administration dropped some Obama policies on a case-by-case basis, there was no general upending of the disparate impact standard. It remained a part of civil rights law. In fact, disparate impact was still used in lawsuits under the first Trump administration despite the general shift in philosophy.
Disparate impact policies were outright supercharged during President Joe Biden’s time in office. One could say that it was the policy at the heart of the Great Awokening following the death of George Floyd.
What followed was four years of highly racialized policies fueled by the federal government. To avoid being labeled “racist,” organizations around the country engaged in outright and often open discrimination to effectively hit racial quotas.
Thanks to President Donald Trump, DOJ will focus on ensuring equality before the law as it should have been from the beginning.
