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Dateline, May 16, 2025. Breaking news. Mainline Protestant and Catholic churches demonstrate their inherent bias by listening to Psalm 98 from the Revised Common Lectionary [ [link removed] ] on this day.
By contrast, the Department of Government Equity (DOGE), formerly led by Elon Musk, uses government data files to identify people to cancel from jobs, grants, contracts, and other activities if their tasks contain words like “equity.”
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Should the Anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Mandate Be Pushed to Its Logical Conclusions?
One wonders whether DOGE workers, the Office of Personnel Management, and the various human resources offices within the Administration now might feel it necessary to take action against this new—well, actually, very old—focus on equity. For instance,
Given the Psalm reading on November 16, should attendees at mainline and Catholic Christian services be excluded from employment and government contracts?
Should that exclusion be expanded to include Jews, Muslims, and evangelical Christians who may not share a common lectionary of daily readings but include the same Psalm among their sacred texts?
Are such Jews guilty of antisemitism, sometimes associated automatically with anything anti-MAGA?
Since other spiritual and religious traditions also express similar concerns, such as the Buddha’s vow [ [link removed] ] to make all people “equal to me, without any distinction between us,” does this mean that only secular nonbelievers are uniquely qualified for top-level jobs in the Trump administration?
Or should the Administration also add a preference for card-carrying Christians who espouse nationalism as their true faith, just as long as they swear to discount Biblical verses such as Psalm 98 or Matthew 25 (which discusses how those who provide no meat to the hungry and no drink to the thirsty might find themselves later victims of collateral damage).
Finally, should DOGE employees try to fire those in the Administration who, on equity grounds, demand greater affirmative action for “conservatives,” “MAGA followers,” and others who define themselves primarily in political terms?
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Why Equity is Not Just a Liberal or Woke Idea
The attack on equity makes no sense whatsoever. The principle of equal justice, or equal treatment of equals, provides a foundation for designing and enforcing laws and, indeed, for many other choices. While it isn’t the only principle guiding government policy and human behavior, conservatives and liberals adhere to it constantly, often without even realizing it.
After all, equal justice is in many ways the queen of policy principles. It applies across government, large or small, and with varying degrees of progressivity. While equal justice is not always easy to measure or enforce, it is inscribed on courthouse and courtroom walls and reflected in justices’ commitment to mete out equal punishment for identical crimes. When I served as the original organizer and economic coordinator of a major Treasury study that contributed to the Tax Reform Act of 1986—one of Ronald Reagan’s and Congress’s key accomplishments during his presidency—applying equal justice to taxing people with equal ability to pay formed a large part of what we at Treasury proposed. Its logic called for reducing or eliminating benefits from many tax shelters and loopholes.
Equal justice often promotes efficiency, as well, by opposing arbitrary distinctions in the law. For example, if you and I both earn a median household income of $90,000 and are otherwise similar, then if you pay $18,000 in income tax and I pay nothing, it will likely distort each of our behaviors more than if we each pay $9,000. The distinction would be inefficient, not just inequitable.
A more complex set of issues surrounds applying another equity principle, progressivity. While progressivity is also a universal principle, there is no simple way to determine an ideal level of progressivity. It can also conflict with various notions of efficiency. Still, it can’t be ignored. Should young children contribute the same to family resources as adults? Should the poor pay the same taxes as middle-income people? In both cases, the answer is “No.” Children and the poor shouldn’t contribute equal amounts as others, and they can’t.
Look, I understand how many past DEI initiatives went too far, especially when they involved lecturing rather than engaging with a community, or waving away any efficiency consequence of hiring less capable people. I also know that many people feel they have been treated unfairly at some point in their lives and want some form of restorative justice. That’s one of the reasons I advocated, in a recent book [ [link removed] ], ending the government’s significant neglect of the working class over the past several decades. But the solution isn’t retribution.
My only point here is that no one can cancel or end equity discussions. Implicitly or explicitly, they inform every governing decision. As this note highlights, the Trump Administration demonstrates this by arguing, correctly or not, that its actions somehow restore equity to the neglected working class, conservatives, persecuted religions, and America-first citizens by attacking elites, liberals, secular forces, and immigrants.
Bottom line: we need to find better ways to address equity concerns without silly retreats into tribal distinctions or attacks on others. It’s hardly a new discussion: scholars believe that Psalm 98, with its concern for equity, was written during the Jewish return from the Babylonian captivity [ [link removed] ] two and a half centuries ago.
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