Most don’t realize that the core of DEI and much of the nonsense in every HR department can be traced back to this EO from the ‘70s. It seemed innocuous at the time, saying govt contractors couldn’t discriminate, but later interpretations broadened that to mean every govt contractor had to obsess over the race and gender of their employees to prove they weren’t “discriminating.”

Thus, they all had to keep records of their employee demographics, and show they were getting more “representative” of the overall population, which in practice meant affirmative action and race and gender quotas. If your company demographics didn’t improve, you’d be open to lawsuits and losing govt contracts. Ironically, the govt couldn’t explicitly mandate quotas, but this was a backdoor way of doing so.

While it only applied to govt contractors, the reality is 1/3 of Fortune 500 companies are considered govt contractors, as are 1/4 of all employees! Google is a govt contractor. Even if a tiny fraction of the company does govt contracts, this EO applied to the entire entity. Plus, the millions already employed by the federal govt and universities. More than any other law, this EO is responsible for affirmative action infiltrating the private sector.

What’s really crazy is that any Republican president (including Trump in his first term) could have repealed it starting with Nixon, but none did. It was the lowest hanging fruit but they were too afraid to touch. Until now.