The White House is rolling out a new "merit-based" federal hiring plan and has explicitly ordered agencies not to take race and gender into consideration when hiring.
"The American people deserve a federal workforce dedicated to American values and efficient service," Vince Haley, assistant to President Donald Trump for domestic policy, and Charles Ezell, acting director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said in a press release.
"Yet, Federal hiring criteria long ago abandoned any serious need for technical skills and adherence to the Constitution. Instead, the overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory 'equity' quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats. The American people, who deserve a government that works for them, have suffered."
The plan calls for reforming the federal recruitment process to ensure that only the most talented, capable, and patriotic Americans are hired to the federal service. It implements skills-based hiring; eliminating unnecessary degree requirements; requiring the use of rigorous, job-related assessments to ensure candidates are selected based on their merit and competence, not their skin color or academic pedigree; streamlining and improving the job application process; and reducing time-to-hire to under 80 days by emphasizing the use of talent pools and shared certificates and streamlining the background check process.
The White House has slashed approximately 100,000 jobs in federal agencies.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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