Opinion | Why Elon Musk and JD Vance Went to Bat for a Self-Described Racist
If you want to understand the nature of our new regime, compare the fates of two federal employees who recently found themselves at least temporarily unable to keep doing their jobs.One is a West Point graduate, Army veteran and former prosecutor who was asked by political appointees in the first Trump administration to join a diversity committee.
The other is a 25-year-old self-described racist.You can probably guess which of them Vice President JD Vance intervened to help out.The West Point grad, who doesn’t want his name used because he’s still hoping to return to his duties, was a regional director at the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education.
Based in a red state, he investigated abuses in the education system including racial discrimination, sexual harassment and the failure to accommodate disabilities.His last three performance reviews were impeccable, according to documents shared with me.
He saw himself as an apolitical civil servant, and told me that even before Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, he was thinking about how to align his office’s priorities with those of the incoming administration.So he was blindsided when, on Jan.
31, he was placed on indefinite administrative leave, along with dozens of other Department of Education employees.He and a few of those colleagues are now being represented by the civil rights attorney Subodh Chandra.Most of those put on leave from the Office of Civil Rights, said Chandra, served on a diversity committee, though some simply took diversity training.
It doesn’t matter that Kenneth Marcus, an assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the first Trump term, created the committee that the regional director served on.It doesn’t matter that in a letter to employees, another Trump official at the time, Kimberly M.
Richey, called its work “critically important.” It doesn’t even matter that, following a promotion, the regional director said he had less and less time f...