One of the more evil things an outgoing administration can do, Steve Sailer notes, is to intentionally forfeit in court against what ought to be a nuisance lawsuit:
For example, its last day in office in January 1981, the Carter administration did long term damage to the U.S. government by abolishing the venerable civil service examination for hiring federal bureaucrats. The pretext was a consent decree throwing the derisory Luevano suit against the Carter Administration that had been rigged up by Carter’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and its allies on the left.
Ironically, civil service exams to reform the spoils system were one of the great causes of 19th century progressives. When President James Garfield was assassinated by a frustrated office-seeker in 1881, public opinion veered decisively toward awarding federal jobs by competitive examination.
During the 1920s, federal testing for job seekers became scientific. By the late 1970s, the federal government had a superb test, the Professional and Administrative Career Examination, which had been validated for 118 different positions.
Of course, blacks and Hispanics did less well on this test than whites and Asians. Therefore the EEOC tacitly sponsored a lawsuit and filed it under the name of a Mexican-American plaintiff who had failed the test, Angel Luevano.
For two years the Carter administration quietly conspired with liberal public interest law firms, the purported opponents in the suit. And as it was packing up, the Carter Justice Department signed a consent decree, approved by a picked judge, junking the civil service examination.
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The outgoing Carter Justice officials declared that no exam could replace PACE until a valid one without adverse impact on blacks and Hispanics could be devised. In the 34 years since, this has proven impossible. So, ever since, most federal jobs have been awarded by various temporary makeshift methods involving high degrees of subjectivity. (Making hiring more ethnically biased was, of course, the point of Luevano.)
They did the same thing across the entire economy, which has had the effect of enshrining the college degree a major discriminator in hiring, even for jobs that have no connection to the degree in question. This has had the further knock-on effect of encouraging people to get more and more credentials, until we have the “credentialed-yet-idiot” class we have running things today.
You can’t convince me that there wasn’t an effective conspiracy to do this. There are too many coincidences, too many convenient little interlocking actions with second- and third-order effects in creating today’s mess of incompetence in governance and business.