POLITICS
Could we be headed for the return of IQ tests?
New Heritage Foundation report seems to say so
This week, we get a another peak at the Heritage Foundation’s latest iteration of the Mandate for Leadership, the conservative think tank’s regular report advising on the next presidential transition. The more that comes out of this latest effort to shape the next administration, the more it all sounds so familiar. Reading the reporting on the Heritage-affiliated The Daily Signal, you’d think Jimmy Carter was still in the White House and there hadn’t been a Republican in power in fifty years.
It was Carter who cemented union power when he signed the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. And, it was Carter who signed away the right to use IQ tests in federal hiring. We’re led to believe, if only, a Carter successor had the will to overturn these harmful policies, all would be well in DC.
This nostalgic turn is part-and-parcel of Heritage’s plea every four years to be listened to. And, Heritage has been widely successful: it has been at the table during every Republican transition since Reagan’s in 1980, including functioning as a “shadow transition” team for Donald Trump in 2016, according to Politico.
This latest iteration of Heritage’s call-to-arms is especially interesting because of the role of one of its authors, Donald Devine (Dennis Dean Kirk and Russ Vought are the others). Devine’s been around DC for a while — nearly as long as Heritage — serving as one of the central figures in the decades-long conservative personnel movement.
Before working as Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM), Devine had been a professor at the University of Maryland before joining the Reagan’s transition team, helping prepare the administration for Day 1.
That’s in part why Devine knows the consent decree signed by Jimmy Carter’s Justice Department to resolve a discrimination case brought two years earlier. The suit charged that the Professional and Administrative Career Examination — or PACE exam — a type of IQ exam used in some federal hiring had a disparate and discriminatory impact on Black and Hispanic job seekers. The New York Times reported at the time that 42% of the whites who took the examination passed it, compared with 13% of the Hispanic Americans and 5% of the Black Americans.
With the clock running out on Carter’s presidency, the Justice Department conceded that the PACE exam was wrong and would be replaced with skill-based exams designed specifically for each job classification.
The Reagan transition team, weeks away from taking office, appealed to the judge to delay filing the settlement until it had had the time to weigh in. Devine, who was leading the Office of Personnel and Management transition team, was surely in on these requests of the judge, who, in the end, denied their claim and moved ahead with the settlement.
This has been a hobby-horse of Devine’s for a while. He’s written about IQ tests for Heritage and for the Imaginative Conservative, and has been writing a lot about personnel reform for Heritage recently. It, then, came as no real surprise, that, despite being established 40 years and four Republican presidents ago, The Daily Signal quotes the new Heritage report as concluding: “Congress or a future administration will have to end the doctrine of disparate impact to resolve this problem.”
Devine’s not averse to conflict, to be sure. While director of OPM, he gained attention by removing Planned Parenthood from the annual federal charity drive. The New York Times called him “the Grinch” for his eagerness to slash federal jobs.
So Devine’s back. His call for a return to the days of IQ tests has the same nostalgia for the past as several other claims made by Heritage and other conservative leaders. In asking “What time it is in America?” and calling for a federal abortion ban and a return to the spoils system, activists ponder whether a future conservative administration can turn the clock back to a very different point in US history.
