Back during the Bush Administration era, the folks who brought us the 7 year futile search of incidents of discrimination against white people also brought us privatization of government. Black folks, due to the sometimes burdensome Government regulations which assured the highest level of employment access and anti-discrimination work for the Government in very high numbers. It is one of the few places where color isn’t a bar to getting a job or rising in the ranks.
Of course, Republicans could not let that continue. So they came up with the idea of privatizing government functions and jobs. Meaning, the hiring and promotion process would be left entirely up to private industry.This led to the whitening of the Federal workforce by several means.
1. The private companies weren’t subject to vigorous review of their hiring practices. A Republican Congress, Extreme Court, and Presidential Appointees fought to reduce or eliminate any penalty for racial or ethnic discrimination.
2. The “Gentrification” of jobs, making the educational and or post educational training requirements (Certifications) requirement substantially higher for the same job, making it more difficult for minorities to apply. This resulted in a number of low level jobs suddenly requiring college degrees, and specific industry certifications which were out of reach of many minorities financially.
3. Allowing contracting companies to easily deny that they couldn’t meet requirements by announcing there was a shortage of “qualified” minority companies or candidates.
This insidious racism also infected the Intelligence Agencies.
8 years later, the Obama Administration finally “gets it”.
Improving workforce diversity a ‘national security imperative’
Before we realized Bill Cosby’s halo was broken, he played a U.S. intelligence officer on NBC’s “I Spy.” There weren’t many black folks on television in the 1960s, and there is too little diversity among the spies and others in national security agencies now.
That’s why President Obama directed agencies “to strengthen the talent and diversity” of their organizations.
“Our greatest asset in protecting the homeland and advancing our interests abroad is the talent and diversity of our national security workforce,” said apresidential memorandum issued Wednesday.
National security agencies “are less diverse on average than the rest of the Federal Government,” including at the senior leadership levels, Obama said in the memorandum. “While these data do not necessarily indicate the existence of barriers to equal employment opportunity, we can do more to promote diversity in the national security workforce.”
Obama told the agencies to take a series of steps to improve diversity, including collecting, analyzing and disseminating workforce data, providing professional development opportunities and strengthening leadership accountability. He said his directive “emphasizes a data-driven approach in order to increase transparency and accountability at all levels.”
Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, praised the data collection as “a necessary first step in recognizing the scope of the problem” to design appropriate solutions.
Obama pointed to the pervasive, insidious role of implicit bias, making “implicit or unconscious bias training mandatory for senior leadership and management positions, as well as for those responsible for outreach, recruitment, hiring, career development, promotion, and security clearance adjudication.”
In June, the Justice Department mandated implicit bias training for its law enforcement officers and prosecutors. In May, acting Office of Personnel Management Director Beth Cobert told federal officials that unconscious bias is a major barrier to diversity and inclusion.
Obama also wants agencies to interview a representative cross-section of staffers, including “exit interviews or surveys of all departing personnel to understand better their reasons for leaving.” That information will analyzed by demographics.
Increasing federal workplace diversity has long been a priority for Obama, as demonstrated by his 2011 executive order promoting diversity and inclusion.
This current effort was driven by National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice. During the last several months, she assembled national security officials in the White House situation room to discuss ways to promote diversity. Her May Florida International University commencement address largely focused on the need to improve national security diversity.
Quoting former Florida senator Bob Graham (D), she told the graduates the workforce is too often “white, male and Yale.” Noting that people of color are almost 40 percent of the nation’s population, Rice said they are less than 20 percent of senior diplomats and less than 15 percent of senior intelligence officials and senior military officers.
“I’m not talking about a human resources issue,” she added. “I’m highlighting a national security imperative.”
Vernon Jordan, a veteran civil rights activist and Washington insider, examined the CIA’s poor diversity record in a blunt 2015 report commissioned by the agency. The CIA went backward in at least one key diversity point during the 2004-2014 period, Jordan wrote in the forward to the 54-page report – the number and percentage of African American senior intelligence officers declined.
Jordan cited a “failure of leadership,” “a general lack of accountability in promoting diversity,” “the absence of an inclusive culture,” and “a deficient recruiting process.”
While racial and ethnic minorities were 23.9 percent of the CIA’s workforce, they were just 10.8 percent of the Senior Intelligence Service.
“The Director must also act promptly and aggressively to identify and promote senior minority intelligence officers to positions that will send an unmistakable message of change,” said the study Jordan led.
Pointed words. But it’s action that counts.
Rice understands that.
The United States, she wrote on the White House blog Wednesday, “must lead the world not by preaching pluralism and tolerance, but by practicing it.”
Btx3's Blog 
CNu
October 9, 2016 at 1:48 PM
Veterans preference is the single greatest deterrent to an effective civil service. Because the ranks are clogged up with the leavings from the “all-volunteer” military, in order to get anything even remotely challenging accomplished, these scrubs have had to contract out all the actual work. Why you had Booz Allen Snowden administering NSA servers instead of a GS-11 sysadmin.
Until the executive severely curtails Veterans preferences in hiring and promotion, this is like 99% of everything else emanating from the Hon.Bro.Preznit’s failed administration(s), just so much symbolic lip-service signifying nothing.
LikeLike
btx3
October 9, 2016 at 4:11 PM
You are talking about an industry I have done some small amount of work in, cuz.
Veterans ain’t the problem.
The CIA is pretty inbred. Mostly because recruiting favors an old-boy network, certain schools, and often familial relationships. That is something that goes back to it’s formation after WWII, AND the fact that when they clear people at the higher levels, they also clear the whole family. So it is typically pretty easy for employee X’s son or daughter to get a job there if they are qualified.
The reason you have Booz doing work at NSA has to do with the Bushit –
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2592322/it-outsourcing/government-eyes—it-outsourcing.html
Prior to the Bushit giving the business to his friends in the big Gub’ment Contracting companies most of the work for the black agencies was done by small, largely captive companies made up of former employees, or folks who had long histories with the agencies. Their work didn’t exactly hit the street for open bid – and it tends to be very specialized and custom. The Government did the vetting – not an outside third party, or the companies themselves.
The DoD side is an entirely different animal. Almost everything they use is made by contractors. Lets put it this way, nobody seriously concerned about security against foreign players is stupid enough to use an off the shelf Cisco router as the core of their network. You say Network to any of the big contractors like Lockheed…First thing they ask you is for your Cisco Certification so’s you can work on their Gub’ment network they built for the Military.
Quite frankly – we go to war with Russia or China at this point…We’re fucked (and it ain’t just the off the shelf routers). And that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Obama, other than a lack of talent at the Cabinet and staff level to understand it and move to fix that isht.
LikeLike