With the stroke of a pen and a defiant nod to his base, Donald Trump has now ordered federal agencies to stop enforcing one of the more quietly powerful civil rights tools on the books: disparate impact liability. This legal doctrine, which for decades allowed courts and regulators to flag discrimination based on unequal outcomes — even when no intent to discriminate was proven — is now in the crosshairs.
What’s Being Scrapped?
Disparate impact liability has been one of the civil rights system’s sharper tools, used not just in employment but also in housing, education, lending, and beyond. The idea is simple: if a seemingly neutral policy leads to unequal harm — say, a hiring test that weeds out most women or a lending practice that routinely denies loans to minority applicants — it could be grounds for legal action. Intent didn’t matter. Outcomes did.
This concept gained teeth in 1971, when the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power that such policies, even without overt racism or sexism, violated the Civil Rights Act. Congress codified that reasoning in 1991, signaling bipartisan support for rooting out systemic discrimination.
Now, that’s being rolled back.
Why Trump Wants It Gone
The April executive order doesn’t mince words: Trump describes disparate impact theory as a Trojan horse for what he sees as a corrosive obsession with diversity over merit. The order frames this doctrine as part of a “pernicious movement” that substitutes statistical parity for fairness.
The move follows his broader campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — a campaign that’s played out in lawsuits, speeches, and now policy. Trump argues that disparate impact cases force companies and institutions to tiptoe around merit-based decisions, and instead focus on racial and gender-based outcomes, regardless of context.
This is not his first attempt. Back in 2020, during his previous term, his administration gutted fair housing rules that were based on disparate impact claims. That rollback was eventually halted and reversed. But with the new order, Trump’s making it clear he intends to finish what he started.
What’s at Stake
Civil rights advocates are sounding alarms. To them, the elimination of disparate impact enforcement strips away the very mechanism that helps uncover structural inequality — especially the kind that hides behind neutral language. It’s not enough, they say, to ask whether someone meant to discriminate. The law should care about the result.
They point out that the legal bar for these claims is already high. Plaintiffs must typically show clear, statistically significant disparities and prove there’s no legitimate justification for the policy in question. If that bar is met, the burden shifts to the employer or institution to defend the practice.
Common targets? Blanket bans on hiring people with criminal records, which disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic applicants. Or strength tests that eliminate older and female candidates from physically demanding jobs. The issue isn’t always the policy itself — it’s the lack of a valid reason behind it.
What the Order Actually Does
The directive is sweeping. Trump’s order tells agency heads — from the Justice Department to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — to stop enforcing any laws through the lens of disparate impact. It also encourages them to revisit existing settlements and cases that were based on it.
That means some companies, schools, landlords, and lenders might soon be off the hook for older agreements that required them to adopt new hiring policies or submit to outside monitoring.
What Comes Next
Expect court battles. Civil rights groups, unions, and Democratic state officials are already preparing legal challenges. Their likely argument? That Trump is overstepping his authority by undermining statutory protections that Congress itself put into law.
Whether those lawsuits will succeed remains to be seen. But the larger picture is clear: the federal government, at Trump’s direction, is retreating from a decades-long commitment to confronting inequality that hides in plain sight. And for communities who’ve relied on that commitment to fight back — this is more than a policy shift. It’s a tectonic one.
