Trump Attempts to Gut the 1964 Civil Rights Act with an Executive Order

Trump’s executive order effectively nullifies a core method by which the federal government enforces the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In a sweeping new executive order titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” President Donald Trump has moved to systematically dismantle one of the most important civil rights enforcement tools of the last half-century: disparate impact liability.

While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains on the books—passed by Congress and beyond the reach of unilateral repeal—Trump’s order effectively nullifies a core method by which the federal government enforces it. By directing agencies to abandon the use of disparate impact theory across all areas of enforcement, and by revoking long-standing presidential approvals of Title VI regulations, the order radically reinterprets federal civil rights law to focus solely on intentional discrimination.

This represents a fundamental shift in legal philosophy. For decades, disparate impact theory has enabled agencies to investigate and remedy policies that, while race-neutral on their face, produce discriminatory outcomes—whether in employment, housing, education, environmental regulation, or access to credit. It reflects the reality that racism in America often functions structurally, not just individually. By contrast, Trump’s executive order embraces a formalist, colorblind conception of equality that ignores context, history, and outcome.

The text of the order frames this shift in the language of fairness, merit, and the Constitution. It claims that disparate impact doctrine “mandates discrimination” by pressuring businesses and agencies to racially balance outcomes, and argues that it violates the Equal Protection Clause. In doing so, the order lifts a favored argument from conservative legal circles—an argument echoed in cases like Parents Involved v. Seattle and Shelby County v. Holder, where the Supreme Court cast doubt on race-conscious remedies for systemic inequity.

But the real impact of this order lies in its scope and specificity. Trump instructs all federal agencies to:

• deprioritize any enforcement that relies on disparate impact;
  
• identify and roll back regulations or guidance that employ this framework;
  
• reassess existing lawsuits, investigations, and even consent decrees currently grounded in disparate impact claims;
  
• coordinate with the Attorney General and the EEOC to change the interpretation of Title VI and Title VII;
  
• and evaluate whether state laws using disparate impact theory are preempted by federal authority.
  

This is a coordinated administrative campaign to gut the enforcement infrastructure of the Civil Rights Act—not through legislative repeal, but through internal regulatory sabotage.

The policy rationale Trump offers is familiar: meritocracy, individualism, and “equality of opportunity.” These phrases, often associated with the civil rights movement itself, are here re-deployed to undermine the mechanisms that once gave them force. The executive order positions itself as a neutral correction to supposed constitutional excesses, but in practice it disables the federal government’s ability to challenge discrimination that manifests in data, patterns, or results. It turns a blind eye to deeply entrenched disparities in favor of surface-level legalism.

Historically, disparate impact has been indispensable in cases where intent was difficult or impossible to prove. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), for example, the Supreme Court held that an employer’s requirement of a high school diploma—while not explicitly racist—disproportionately excluded Black applicants and was not related to job performance. This ruling opened a path to address indirect forms of discrimination that were—and still are—pervasive.

By reversing course, Trump’s order pushes civil rights enforcement back to a pre-Griggs era. It narrows the definition of discrimination so dramatically that entire categories of inequality—redlining, biased algorithms, exclusionary zoning—could become legally invisible, simply because they don’t come with explicit racist intent.

While the order stops short of repealing civil rights statutes outright, it represents the most aggressive federal effort in decades to reinterpret those statutes in a way that renders them inert. The Trump administration is betting that with a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, it can survive legal challenges. And it may. Already, recent decisions on affirmative action and voting rights show a judicial trend toward dismantling race-conscious protections under the banner of neutrality.

In effect, the executive order doesn’t merely revise enforcement priorities—it redefines the very meaning of civil rights in American law. It signals that Trump’s second term will continue his broader project of institutional rollback, not just of “wokeness” or bureaucratic norms, but of the legal frameworks that support racial and social justice. The goal, laid bare in this document, is to return to an era when equal protection meant formal equality only—when the law saw no color, and therefore no need to address inequality at all.

This executive order is not merely symbolic. It will change how agencies like HUD, the EEOC, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice operate. It could lead to the dismissal of ongoing investigations into discriminatory practices. It could halt enforcement of civil rights laws in cases involving housing segregation, school funding disparities, hiring algorithms, and more.

And it sets the stage for further action: the order explicitly invites agencies to identify state-level disparate impact laws for potential preemption challenges. It’s not just a retreat from civil rights enforcement—it’s an escalation.

Under this administration, civil rights laws will no longer be used to address unequal outcomes, regardless of how deeply those outcomes reflect systemic injustice. The commitment to equality under the law is being redefined—narrowed, hollowed out, and recast in a form that favors those already holding power.

This is not the end of civil rights law. But it may be the beginning of its eclipse.

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