The piece argues that civil‑rights–era disparate‑impact standards and diversity mandates displaced meritocratic selection, steadily eroding the competence needed to run interdependent systems. It links mishaps in the Navy, utilities, pipelines, ports, rail, and air traffic to this long‑run capacity decline. The claim is that when selection for skill is politically constrained, failure cascades across tightly coupled infrastructures.
— If correct, it shifts debates on DEI and civil‑rights enforcement from symbolism to system safety, implying reforms to hiring, testing, and legal standards to restore capacity.
Thomas F. Powers
2026.01.16
91% relevant
Powers’s article critiques the disparate‑impact doctrine and cites HUD’s probe of Boston equity policies—exactly the locus where disparate‑impact logic has been argued to replace intent‑based enforcement and to reorder bureaucratic decisionmaking; the article supplies a current administrative example (Trainor’s HUD actions) that maps directly onto the existing idea’s claim that disparate‑impact regimes degrade institutional competence.
2025.10.07
100% relevant
The article ties SAT/aptitude‑test merit era (e.g., GRE, AGCT) to high‑performance achievements, then blames post‑1960s disparate‑impact doctrine for later Navy collisions, PG&E wildfires, Colonial Pipeline ransomware stoppage, port backlogs, East Palestine derailment, and runway near‑misses.
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