In a brief hearing in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., a 44-year-old consent decree that prohibited the federal government from assessing the skills and abilities of job applicants ended. The decree, known as the Luevano Consent Decree, based on its roots in the Luevano vs. Ezell case. In doing so, President Trump’s administration made good on another promise to bring egalitarian competence back into fashion.
The action began in 1979, when Angel Luevan filed a lawsuit alleging that the federal government’s Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE), the test used for civil service hiring, had a disparate impact on Black and Hispanic applicants. In 1981, the Carter administration entered into a consent decree during its waning days that made it impossible for the federal government to use any kind of test for federal employment. Between 1981 and 1991, the Office of Personnel Management experimented with six different tests, all of which failed to pass the disparate impact test. In the end, the federal government began hiring based solely on unvetted resumes submitted by candidates.
After the demise of the Professional and Administrative Career Examination and similar tests, the government began relying on “self-assessments” to sift through job applicants, as it was the only measure that saw a sufficient number of minorities enter government. Applicants simply declared how good they were at a task, with no attempt to verify it or compare them to other applicants. That led to a hiring process that rewarded boasting and fabrications as much as merit.
Kupor said the de facto prohibition on government checking people’s competency before hiring them — at which point they become difficult to remove — had become particularly crippling in the modern age, with people using artificial intelligence or simply copy-and-paste to take a job advertisement’s requirements and send an application asserting that they had all those skills.
The USAJobs system is rife with biases towards incompetent candidates and contains too many internal reassignment preferences that preclude better external candidates from being interviewed.