On August 18, 2011 the White House released an Executive Order Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce giving federal workers 90 days to develop a workforce plan to increase diversity and another 120 days to implement it.
By this order, I am directing executive departments and agencies (agencies) to develop and implement a more comprehensive, integrated, and strategic focus on diversity and inclusion as a key component of their human resources strategies. This approach should include a continuing effort to identify and adopt best practices, implemented in an integrated manner, to promote diversity and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity, consistent with merit system principles and applicable law.
The WH announced the intention of doing this last year and now there's a concrete plan of action.Washington Post
The long-awaited executive order directs a group of high-ranking officials to create a government-wide plan, followed by specific plans in each agency. It marks the highest-profile response to a problem that has been on the administration’s radar: Whites still hold more than 81 percent of senior pay-level positions.
“The federal government has a special opportunity to lead by example,” John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said in a conference call. “We will only succeed in our critical mission with a workforce that hails from, represents and is connected to the needs of every American community.”
The order creates a framework, but the details have not been worked out. Instead of creating a new administrative body, as with Obama’s 2009 executive order on veterans’ employment, this initiative will look to a council of deputy agency chiefs. OPM, the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will participate.
That group will be responsible for creating a government-wide plan within 90 days. According to the order, after that plan is released, each agency must present its own specific diversity plan within 120 days. The efforts must reflect initiatives on a number of fronts, including recruitment, training and promotion.
Current workforce statistics:
According to the latest Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program Report, women hold 31 percent of senior positions, African Americans 7 percent and Latinos 4 percent.
As low as those numbers are, they're much worse when seen in light of the racial breakdown in the local community.
So that was the good news.
The hysterical afterward is from Pat Buchanan who criticizes President Obama's Race-Based Spoils System.
...Obama, wrote Isaac Arnsdorf, is targeting "a problem that has been on the administration's radar. Whites still hold more than 81 percent of senior pay-level positions."
Now, as white folks are two-thirds of the U.S. population, and perhaps three-fourths of those in the 45 to 65 age group who would normally be at senior federal positions, why is this "a problem"?
As no one has contended otherwise, we have to assume that the men and women who hold these top positions got there because of the longevity of their service and the superiority of their skills.
Why is the color of their skin a "problem" for Barack Obama?
...African-Americans are hardly underrepresented in the U.S. government.
Though only 12 percent to 13 percent of the U.S. population, blacks hold 18 percent of all federal jobs. African-Americans are 25 percent of the employees at Treasury and Veterans Affairs, 31 percent of State Department employees, 37 percent of the Department of Education, 38 percent of Housing and Urban Development. They are 42 percent of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., 55 percent of the Government Printing Office, 82 percent of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.
According to The Washington Post, blacks hold 44 percent of the jobs at Fannie Mae and 50 percent of the jobs at Freddie Mac.
The EEOC, where African-Americans are overrepresented by 300 percent, has been asked to oversee the new "government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce."
I'm not making this up.
I'm not making this up.
Look at this zoomable map, Visualizing a Changing Region, Block by BlockRace/Ethnicity Trends in the Metro Area, 2000 to 2010 using the side-by-side view of Washington DC's and you'll see graphically that just the one category of African American racial breakdown, there are far more than 7% African American workers in the local Washington DC workforce pool. In fact the African American population in Washington DC in 200 was 60%.
Maybe Pat Buchanan would like a busing plan to bus white men into Washington DC to balance out the racial segregation!