The Competency Lens
A New Hope
All projects, policies, and personnel decisions shall be viewed through a diversity lens.
You can find that statement, or a variation thereof, in literally tens of thousands of government documents that have been produced over the past few years.
What you will never find is this:
We shall view all projects, policies, and personnel decisions through a competency lens.
Services shall be delivered, emergencies shall be handled properly, budgets will (at least vaguely – can’t expect too much) be paid attention to, the public will understand what is happening and why.
That is the competency lens and that may very well be returning to public life.
With President Trump’s executive order shutting down all federal DEI programs, it is a distinct possibility that looking at projects and such through the competency lens of “Does it make sense? Whom does it serve? Can we really do it? Does it serve a purpose? How much does it cost?” is about to become the main focus, as it were.
What will the order archive at the federal level? Eventually (all DEI folks are on paid leave and certain agencies like the ATF are desperately scrambling to reclassify employees ) it will save tax dollars that can be put towards more useful efforts, like, well, um, they were DEI dollars so literally anything would be more useful.
But beyond the federal level, every other government agency will feel the crushing weight of the snowball rolling down the hill.
That’s because – at the local and state level – DEI workers there exist pretty much only to respond to the feds. Federal diversity regulation A-42, sub-paragraph B, section 33 regarding local sidewalk improvement projects must be administered by someone, right?
By the way, that regulation may not technically exist, but it is true that the federal Department of Transportation has had civil rights lawyers in staff to ensure sidewalks are not racist.
As the feds leave the scene, the local DEI folks become even more meaningless than they are currently and the justification to keep paying people to show up to meetings to complain about how the rest of city government does not have 1.4% of employees identifying as “gender oblivious” gradually fades away.
In private industry, this process started even before Trump’s inauguration, as CEO-types realized that DEI departments are unnecessary and divisive and expensive and merely an outgrowth of the evils of HR and add no value to the bottom line. It did add value for a bit, with executives being able to say they had a DEI department to shut up critics, but that obfuscation has faded.
Trump or not, it is now okay to say the DEI industry has been a pointless aggressive failure – that dam burst and there is no little Dutch boy to put his finger in that dyke anymore.
From an industry that essentially did not exist a few years ago to a $12 billion effort to what was expected to be a $30 billion project in 2030, DEI was held out as both morally pure and a pure gravy train for the otherwise well-credentialed (not actually well-educated) but unemployable humans being churned out by academia.
With government efforts (note – if your local government is a member of GARE – an international interagency group dedicated to equity that has even produced a handbook for bureaucrats to teach them how to strongarm their electeds and the public into, if not agreeing with DEI, at least shutting up about it demand it pull out immediately ) destined to fade, what will remain of the DEI industry?
The “third sector” QUANGOS and foundations will continue to spout nonsense and their inherently spurious reports will be endlessly cited by what remains of the maelstrom media. Abominations like The California Endowment – originally set up as a foundation to help people get access to health insurance and now merely a DEI factory – will still have their own money and will never go away.
But will they be hiring? We’ll see.
One would think academia is where the concept would never die and it is true it will put up a valiant rear-guard action, but then something will happen.
Over the past decade or so, a government grant request about literally any topic – from sociology to physics – that referenced DEI was almost certain to be funded.
Now, not so much.
And that goes beyond the basic “research” involved in the grant process as many universities charge up to 50% overhead for “admin” on each and every grant the school receives. When incoming National Institutes of Health chief Dr. Jay Bhattacharya promised becomes reality and government grants specifically cannot involve DEI detritus, the schools may rethink their attitudes.
The University of California system, for example, said this a few years ago:
“Federal funds are the university's single most important source of support for research – in FY 2018, UC was awarded $2.95 billion in federal research awards, more than half of the university’s total research awards.”
Obviously that number has increased.
Harvard, for example, raked in more than $100 million in “overhead” and/or admin costs related to federal grant receipts in 2022 alone
With the feds not only banning internal DEI efforts and soon to be banning DEI as a consideration in grant funding, what with the schools do?
Guess.
And then DEI’s diagnosis becomes terminal.
And then competency lens can become the only focus.