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The Washington Post editorial board praised U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi Wednesday for rolling back a woke doctrine at the Department of Justice.
The board’s column defended Bondi’s move, saying that the legal doctrine of “disparate impact” she dismantled had encouraged institutions that receive DOJ grants to have a problematic focus on race.
“But if a future Democratic administration wants to recommit to woke politics, it will still have many tools at its disposal,” the board wrote. “One of them is the legal doctrine of ‘disparate impact,’ which encourages companies, universities and state and local governments to fixate on race and ethnicity to a fault.”
The Washington Post praised Pam Bondi on Wednesday for dismantling a legal doctrine at the Department of Justice that encouraged U.S. institutions to develop a problematic fixation on race. (Andrew Harnik/Getty)
The Post explained how disparate impact stretched the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its target of intentional discrimination “to the point of incoherence.”
“It says that different average outcomes among groups — even if there was no intent to discriminate — can still be a civil rights violation. Institutions that receive Justice Department grants have been regulated according to this standard, prohibited from doing anything that has the ‘effect’ of creating disparities among groups,” the board said.
In Bondi’s document rescinding the doctrine, she argued that it had subjected DOJ grant recipients to penalties under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act even for “unintentional disparate outcomes, which the recipient may not even know about without investigation.”
As The Post noted, this previous framework would encourage certain institutions to classify their employees and students based on race and, in some cases, “impose racial preferences” to meet quotas to avoid “unequal conditions.
The Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Xinhua/Liu Jie via Getty Images)
“In some circumstances, those preferences were mandated,” the editorial board said.
The Post added Bondi’s quote that the doctrine “seems to both forbid and require the same conduct.”
Bondi’s move followed President Donald Trump’s executive order in April mandating the elimination of “the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals.”
Trump’s order said disparate impact “holds that a near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination exists where there are any differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practice or discriminatory intent involved, and even if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.”
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Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during the announcement of a law enforcement action during a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., Nov. 19, 2025. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)
The Post editorial board also rebuffed critics who claim that Bondi’s directive somehow opens the door for more discrimination.
“Claims that these revisions somehow authorize discrimination are bogus. They do the opposite. Purposely treating one group differently than another remains illegal, as it should.”
The board added, “Intent matters. Otherwise, the federal government has a free-floating license to zealously police the racial composition of private institutions. Some of the Trump administration’s anti-woke agenda has been irresponsible, but this is a reasonable correction to past overreach.”
When asked for comment, a DOJ spokesperson pointed Fox News Digital to a press release on Bondi’s order.
A portion of it stated, “The Department’s new rule reflects the best reading of Title VI, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized for over twenty years. Title VI has and will continue to prohibit intentional discrimination. The Department’s new rule ensures that recipients of federal funding will be judged on their actual conduct, not on statistical outcomes or circumstances beyond their control.”
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