Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, LITIGATION NEWS, TRENDS—On motion by Trump administration, court throws out decades-old consent decree remedying disparate impact in federal hiring, (Aug 5, 2025)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

“For over four decades, this decree has hampered the federal government from hiring the top talent of our nation,” claims Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

In 1979, a group of plaintiffs, representing a nationwide class of Blacks and Hispanic job applicants, instituted a lawsuit alleging that the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) discriminates against class members in violation of Title VII. At that time, PACE was an assessment instrument used by OPM to identify qualified individuals for consideration for employment in entry-level GS-5 or GS-7 jobs for 118 professional and administrative occupations in the Federal service. Indeed, around the same time, a GAO report found that 99 percent of the Black applicants and 84 percent of the white applicants who took the test were screened out of competition. After two years of litigation and settlement negotiations, a consent decree was put in place in the early 1980s.

In March, the Trump administration moved the court to terminate the decree and in late July, named representatives of the class joined the motion. It was granted by the court.

Great again. Yesterday, the Department of Justice and the White House both issued statements lauding the decision dismissing the decree. The White House described the decree as a “major hurdle to merit-based hiring within the federal workforce” and claimed that the President can now “make good” on his promise to “restore the high standards that taxpayers expect from federal service.”

“We’re making civil service great again,” OPM Director Scott Kupor stated in an interview that was included in the White House announcement. In a separate press release, the Justice Department stated that the decree “imposed draconian test review and implementation procedures on” OPM in what it described as “an attempt to require equal testing outcomes among all races of test-takers.”

“For over four decades, this decree has hampered the federal government from hiring the top talent of our nation,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

I Have a Dream. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for the District of Columbia briefly quoted the late Reverand Martin Luther King Jr., from his famous “I Have a Dream” speech delivered as part of a march on the nation’s capital in 1963 for racial justice, in an attempt to explain the merits of the decision to dismiss the decree.

“It’s simple, competence and merit are the standards by which we should all be judged; nothing more and nothing less,” said Pirro. “It’s about time people are judged, not by their identity, but instead ‘by the content of their character.’” (emphasis added editorially)

Martin Luther King Jr. also said this in that famous 1963 speech:

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, Black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

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